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NATURE SERMONS 


By Cartes E. JEFFERSON, D.D. 


Nature Sermons . .. . .$1.50 
Five Present-Day Controversies 1.50 
Linder Twenty cei. \ iene tie eR 
What the War Has Taught Us 1.50 
Old Truths and New Facts. . 1.50 


Roman Catholicism and the Ku 
Klux Klan . . Paper, net 25c. 


NATURE SER 





lt 


CHARLES E.’JEFFERSON, D.D., LL.D. 
Pastor, The Broadway Tabernacle, New York, N. Y. 





New Yore CHICAGO 


Fleming H. Revell Company 


LONDON AND EDINBURGH 


Copyright, MCMxXxv, by 
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 


Printed in the United States of America 


New York: 158 Fifth Avenue 
Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave. 
London: 21 Paternoster Square 
Edinburgh: 75 Princes Street 


CONTENTS 


INTRODUCTORY 

THE RAINBOW 
DESERTS 

BIRDS . 

SUNSETS 

STORMS 

SHADOWS 

SOUNDS ° 

MISTS . : ‘ : 
SPRING 

CIDOURS aaa iteeny ts 
THE LANDSCAPE : 


LAKES ‘ . s ° 


108 


135 


162 


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I 
INTRODUCTORY 


HIS is a volume of Nature sermons. By 
7 Nature sermons, I mean a sermon which 
draws its substance from some phenomenon 
or feature or aspect of the physical creation. It 
differs, chiefly, from the conventional sermon in two 
points. The traditional sermon has a text taken from 
the Bible; the Nature sermon needs no text at all. Its 
theme is an object or a fact or a picture set forth in the 
book of Nature. In the second place, the materials of 
the ordinary sermon are collected for the most part 
from books, whereas the materials made use of in a 
Nature sermon are largely drawn from the physical 
universe. In preparing his usual sermon, the preacher 
takes down his various versions of the Bible, his com- 
mentaries, dictionaries and encyclopedias; he consults, 
perhaps, various volumes of history and biography 
and ethics and sociology; sometimes he quotes a novel 
or a stanza of poetry, a magazine or a newspaper. It 
is not uncommon for a preacher to make use of a 
score of volumes in the creation of a single sermon. 
But in writing a Nature sermon, the preacher locks his 
library door and takes a stroll through God’s Out-of- 
Doors. He endeavours to get near to Nature’s heart. 
She supplies him with hints and suggestions, ideas and 
illustrations, and becomes to him a medium of revela- 
tion of the mind of God. 
If a critic should intimate that a sermon is not a 
sermon without a text, the reply is that Amos and 
Hosea were great preachers, and both of them preached 


7 


8 NATURE SERMONS 


effective sermons without texts. Isaiah and Jeremiah 
were mighty spokesmen for God, but neither one of 
them was in the habit of going to a book for a text. 
The Hebrew prophets were the great preachers of pre- 
Christian times, and it was their custom to organize 
their sermons around facts and events. In the experi- 
ences of their own heart or of their nation, they found 
the material which it was their mission to interpret 
and apply. In the victories and defeats, the joys and 
the tribulations of their people, they read the will of 
the Eternal. In their teaching they were always fall- 
ing back on suggestions and inspirations which swept 
in upon them from the heavens and the earth, A 
drought, an earthquake, a famine, a fruitful season, 
were to them words of the Lord. No Old Testament 
sermon has the smell of the lamp. 

The Apostles followed the example of the prophets, 
dealing in their sermons, not with sentences taken from 
a book, but with facts and events and experiences, 
especially the experiences of Jesus. The Founder of 
our religion did not preach from texts. The Sermon 
on the Mount has no text, nor has any other recorded 
discourse of our Lord. He drew His sermons out of 
His heart, refusing to preach after the fashion of the 
scribes—preachers who got their sermons out of books. 
He made use of the Old Testament, occasionally, when 
by doing it He could answer an objection of His foes, 
or flash light upon an idea which He was endeavouring 
to drive home; but He seldom went to a book in search 
of sentences with which to begin His discourses. He 
kept the eyes of His hearers, not on the pages of a 
book, but on the book of Life, as that life was unfold- 
ing itself all around Him, and on the book of Nature 
whose paragraphs it was His delight to read. “ Look 


ol 


INTRODUCTORY 9 
1 939 


at the flowers!”” He was wont to say. “ Look at the 
birds!” “Look at the fields of waving grain!” 
“ Look at the sunbeams and the passing showers!” It 
was His joy to preach under the open sky, seated on 
the grass, with the songs of birds in His ear, and 
the silver gleam of the sea in His eye. 

To the Hebrew mind, Nature was a medium of reve- 
lation. “ The heavens declare the glory of God; and 
the firmament sheweth his handiwork. Day unto day 
uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowl- 
edge.” Nature reveals the character of God because 
Nature is the creation of God. ‘ Who covereth the 
heaven with clouds, who prepareth rain for the earth, 
who maketh grass to grow upon the mountains. 
are He giveth snow like wool. He scattereth 
the noatendst like ashes. He casteth forth his ice like 
morsels: . . He sendeth out his word, and 
melteth them: ie causeth his wind to blow, and the 
waters flow.’ And because God has created the forces 
of Nature, all these forces are His servants, and they 
exist solely to do His will. “ Praise the Lord from 
the earth, ye dragons and all deeps; fire and hail, snow 
and vapours; stormy wind fulfilling his word.” Paul 
was true to the Hebrew conception when he wrote 
to the Romans that “the invisible things of him 
[God] since the creation of the world are clearly seen, 
being understood by the things that are made, even 
his eternal power and Godhead.” 

If, then, the physical creation is a revelation of the 
character and will of the Eternal, why should a Chris- 
tian minister ignore Nature in his preaching? Why 
should he deal solely with ideas uttered by holy men 
of old, and turn his back upon the fresh revelation 
which God is making daily in the phenomena and 


¥ 


10 NATURE SERMONS 


processes of the material creation? As Emerson long 
ago wrote: “ The foregoing generations beheld God 
and Nature face to face, we through their eyes. Why 
should we not also enjoy an original relation to the 
universe?” If some one says that the preacher is 
bound to get his sermon out of the Word of God, the 
reply is that he does not forsake the Word of God 
when he goes to Nature. What is the book of Nature 
but a version of the Word of God? Is not the book 
of Nature a Bible—an earlier Bible—God’s oldest 
Bible—and why should we allow the recent Bible, 
the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, to crowd the 
ancient Bible completely out? Sir Thomas Browne 
was a wise man when he wrote: “ There are two 
books from which I collect my divinity; besides the 
written one of God, another of His servant Nature, 
that universal and public manuscript that lies expansed 
unto the eyes of all. Those that never saw Him in 
the one have discovered Him in the other.” 

This is a volume of sermons. ‘Those who expect 
essays or lectures will be disappointed. A Nature 
sermon like every other type of sermon may readily 
slip into something other than that it purports to be. 
Calling a pulpit discourse a sermon does not make it 
a sermon. A Nature sermon may degenerate into a 
Nature essay. The preacher may ape the manner of 
Henry Thoreau or John Burroughs, but an essay is © 
not a sermon. Essay-writing is not the forte of the 
preacher. A Nature sermon may also glide into a 
Nature lecture. The preacher may try to imitate 
Ffuxley and Tyndall, Lankester and Lodge, but if he 
does this, he is sure to fail. A lecture is not a sermon. 
An essay aims at instruction and entertainment. A 
lecture has for its prime object, the impartation of 


INTRODUCTORY II 


knowledge. It furnishes information which the intel- 
lect may store up for future use. But the aim of the 
sermon is to move the soul nearer to God. It may 
instruct, but the instruction is secondary. It may en- 
tertain, but the entertaining is incidental. The ob- 
ject of a genuine sermon is edification—the building 
up of the soul in God. This is a volume of Nature 
sermons. I am neither an essayist nor a lecturer. I 
lack the talent of an essayist, and my knowledge of 
science is meagre. For Nature essays one must go 
to the library, and for Nature lectures to the univer- 
sity. The Christian pulpit is no place for either essays 
or lectures. The pulpit was built for the preacher. 
Woe to the man in the pulpit who does not preach! 
If a Nature sermon is less of a sermon than one built 
on a text of Holy Writ, it is unworthy of a place in 
the pulpit. The aim of all these Nature sermons is to 
move the mind and heart nearer to God. 

It was near the end of the nineteenth century that 
I decided to add a string to my pulpit harp, and on 
at least one Sunday of every year to preach a Nature 
sermon. The immediate occasion of my resolution 
was the unsettled condition of the Christian mind 
owing to the endless discussion of the results of the 
Higher Criticism. The air was filled with puzzling 
questions, and the minds of many were disturbed. 
Men were eagerly asking who wrote The Pentaieuch, 
who wrote The Psalms, who wrote Isaiah, who wrote 
The Fourth Gospel, who wrote The Pastoral Epistles? 
The question of authorship was at the front. And 
so, also, was the question of date. In what century 
were these ancient writings written? Which were 
exilic—which pre-exilic—which post-exilic? Which 
of the New ‘Testament writings belong to the first cen- 


12 NATURE SERMONS 


tury, and which belong to the second? There was 
interminable wrangling over interpolations and redac- 
tions and glosses. Opposing schools affirmed and de- 
nied the genuineness and authenticity of nearly all the 
Sacred Writings. 

With all Christendom in such a turmoil, I turned 
one Sunday to that ancient Bible, of whose plenary 
inspiration there can be no doubt, and in regard to 
whose authority all sane minds are agreed. However 
it may be with the Old and New Testaments, we know 
who wrote the Scriptures of the heavens and the 
earth. There are no interpolations in the skies. No 
redactor has left his mark upon the seas. No forger 
has ever tampered with the dawn. Men may hesitate 
to call the Book which lies upon the pulpit God’s Book, 
but who would hesitate to call Nature the Book of 
God? He writes His autograph in lines of silver fire 
across the night, He writes it in the flames of setting 
suns, He writes it in the changing shimmer of 
the sea. But no matter how He writes it, we always 
recognize His hand. And as for dates, we do not 
think of dates when we feast our eyes on mountain- 
peaks, or gaze into a sky filled with stars. No one 
cares what the year was in which the Atlantic Ocean, 
like a big boy, came up to play on the sand on Rocka- 
way Beach, nor does any one have the slightest curi- 
osity to know the number of the century in which the ~ 
Great Bear joined the procession of the constellations 
ordered to move around the Pole. If at any time the 
brain becomes confused by the arguments and counter- 
arguments of the scholars, it is well to close the Book 
which contains the words of Prophets and Apostles, 
and read, for a little while, what has been written by 
the undoubted finger of God. 


INTRODUCTORY 13 


" The big Book which the Church prizes as an in- 
valuable treasure is both human and divine. It is 
God’s Book, and it is also man’s Book. In this Book, 
God and man have collaborated to produce a message 
to meet the needs of mankind. It is impossible to 
draw the line, severing the divine from the human. In 
listening to the Bible, one cannot at all times tell 
whether he is listening to man or to God. When one 
listens to Nature he is certain he is listening to God. 
No human creature has ever been permitted to collabo- 
rate with the Eternal in the unfolding of the morning 
or in the painting of a dying day—in the decking of 
the Springtime or in the creation of the pageantry of 
a cloudless night. ‘There are no human finger-prints 
either on the ocean or on the clouds. When one be- 
comes bewildered by the strife of tongues over the 
doctrine of Inspiration, let him turn to the sacred 
volume whose authority cannot be questioned, and 
whose authorship cannot be successfully assailed. If 
the Zeitgeist make him sceptical as to the validity of 
the voices which speak through prophecy and psalm, 
through epistle and gospel, let him pay reverent atten- 
tion to another set of voices—the voices which come 
sounding through the flowers and the forests, through 
the beauty of the landscapes and the thunder of storms. 
Nature and the Bible are both rich gifts of God. Let 
us use them both. 

Moreover: I was preaching to a city congregation, 
and city congregations are in special need of the heal- 
ing influences of the woods and fields. A great city 
has a tendency, in generous natures, to enlarge the 
mind and widen the heart, but in certain ways it has 
a tendency to dwarf and narrow. While the intel- 
lectual faculties are whetted to a keener edge, the phys- 


14 NATURE SERMONS 


ical senses are in danger of becoming atrophied. A 
city shuts men in behind walls of marble and steel, 
brick and granite, and these are not a wholesome en- 
vironment for human nerves. Eyeballs which are 
rubbed constantly against asphalt and iron lose some- 
thing of their power of seeing, and ears which are 
filled incessantly with the hubbub and clang of the 
street lose something of their power of hearing. Now 
and again, one needs to escape from the gloomy can- 
yons of city streets, where the sky is cut into narrow 
and dingy ribbons, and where the air is tainted with 
the poison of a thousand unhallowed smells, and look 
upon the world which God has made. One needs to 
bathe his eyes in the dew upon the morning grass, and 
to wash his mind in the perfumes of the fields. It is 
not conducive to fullness of life to live uninterruptedly 
in a city. A city is an artificial creation—a piece of 
the handiwork of man. It is a man-made world. A 
city man is in danger of settling down in the convic- 
tion that there is no other world. He reads the papers 
morning and evening. He gets his eyes full of 
printer’s ink. After dinner, he goes to the theatre, and 
feasts upon the cheap and tawdry scenery of the stage. 
In the street he is jostled and hustled by the crowd. 
In his business he contends with the perversities of 
many types of human nature. Often he is irritated 
and, at times, he is exasperated. City life is always © 
tending to become feverish and abnormal. A city man 
needs frequent contacts with Nature. He that hath 
ears to hear can hear Nature saying: “ Come unto 
me and [ will give you rest.” 

Nature is a great rest-giver. And Nature is a great 
physician. In the city we become excitable and hot. 
We move at a headlong pace. ‘The interruptions and 


INTRODUCTORY 18 


collisions are many. We need a physician who can 
take the fever from the brow and the fret out of the 
heart. Nature has remedies for all who are sick. The 
pessimism and cynicism of great cities are the result 
of continuous contact with human tragedies and 
miseries. Something is always going wrong; vice is 
always flaunting itself in one’s face; crime is always 
being committed, some one is always suffering; some 
one is always dying. It is difficult to keep serene and 
sane in such a bedlam of a world. We need Nature. 
She is sensible and strong. She has no vagaries, no 
hallucinations, no delusions. She indulges in no fads. 
She wastes no time in speculations or guesses. She 
keeps, for ever, an even pulse. We need her. To 
think of her quiets the heart; to gaze on her calm 
face is refreshment and power. 

Why is the human world so agitating and ea 
How could it be otherwise? When one thinks of the 
great mass of rebellious souls and disordered minds 
and corrupted hearts which go to make up a city, it 
is not to be wondered at that a world so constituted 
should irritate us, drag us down and wear us out. The 
world of Nature is soothing because there is no sin 
there. No blade of grass has ever broken a divine 
commandment, no flower has ever blushed with guilt, 
no tree has ever lifted itself in insurrection against the 
Most High. Not a rock has ever entertained an evil 
thought. Not an insect has ever rejected the Divine 
Mercy. Not a mountain, lake or sea has ever blas- 
phemed the name of Christ. Not a twig has ever been 
twisted by remorse. Throughout the realm of Nature 
obedience is perfect, submission to the Divine Will is 
instantaneous and complete. In the midst of such sur- 
roundings the soul is calmed and charmed and lifted. 


16 NATURE SERMONS 


Nature is a giver of joy. The Kingdom of God is 
a Kingdom of Joy, but joyousness is not one of the 
notes of the life of the average Christian. We are 
not joyous because we have not advanced far into the 
Kingdom of God. As the years increase, many of 
the fountains of happiness begin to fail. He is a wise 
man who keeps as many fountains as possible flowing. 
The love of Nature is an unfailing fountain of joy. 
The aged man of eighty, as well as the youth of 
twenty, can drink at her springs and be satisfied. For 
the man or woman who has learned to enter into the 
wonder and bloom of the mighty world of eye and 
ear, there is a perpetual feast spread, and no matter 
what happens, life will not be without its solace and 
its song. The spirit of Nature is the spirit of Joy. 
An ancient poet says that when the foundations of 
the earth were laid, “ the morning stars sang together, 
and all the sons of God shouted for joy.” When we 
love Nature we enter into the joy of our Lord. I 
have preached these sermons on Nature because I 
wished to be a helper of your joy. 

“Back to Nature!” That is one of the thrilling 
slogans of our generation. Who are these men and 
women who have caught a new vision of the glory 
of the physical creation, and who are drinking from it 
fresh strength and gladness? ‘They are the artists 
and the poets, the scientists and the educators. Why 
should not the preacher join the procession? Why 
should not the Christian Church be baptized into this 
revivifying spirit? Why should not the servants of 
the King enrich their conception of the majesty and 
wisdom of the Maker of heaven and earth by meditat- 
ing more often on the things which He has made? 


II 
THE RAINBOW 


HERE is an interesting paragraph in the ninth 
chapter of the old Book of Genesis, in which 
an ancient writer gives his idea of the reason 

for the creation of the rainbow. ‘The earlier chapters 
of Genesis are filled with bits of folk-lore that come 
down from an immemorial past. Some Hebrew mind 
seized upon a number of these old traditions, cleansed 
them and converted them into vehicles for the expres- 
sion of high, spiritual truths. From the earliest times 
men had looked upon the rainbow, no doubt, with in- 
terest. The Hebrew mind pondered it, asking the 
question: “Who made it? Of course it could not 
have come of itself. It could not exist by blind neces- 
sity. Somebody must have madeit. Who could have 
made it but God?” ‘That is the way in which the 
Hebrew mind worked, and that is the way in which 
every normal mind works. Only minds that have been 
spoiled by false education, work in any other way. 
But why did God make the rainbow? What is the 
purpose of it? What end does it serve? He did not 
make it by accident. Its mighty arch was not bent 
without a definite intention. There was a purpose. 
What was it? It wasamessage. It was intended to 
say something. It was to communicate a word from 
God to man. What was its message? The Hebrew 
mind said its message must be a sweet one; it must be 
from the tender side of God. ‘The rainbow is so soft 
and so beautiful, it must speak of God’s friendliness. 
And because the rainbow always appears after a storm 


Preached, May 26, 1912. 
17 


18 NATURE SERMONS 


the Hebrew mind came to the conclusion that this was 
God’s way of saying to men: “ Do not be frightened 
by storms, they are transitory and harmless, you will 
never be submerged by them. Just to remind you of 
My goodness and My interest in you, I am going to 
put My bow in the cloud.” So, to the Hebrew mind, 
the rainbow became a promise, a token, a sign, a pledge 
of God’s goodness, an emblem of His love. 

And there was need of just such an emblem, for 
there are many things in Nature which are dark. 
There are phenomena which seem like threats. If 
taken alone, they would be conclusive evidence that the 
Deity is angry, that at the heart of the world there is 
a wild indignation. When one thinks of the roar of 
the sea, and how it often bellows and leaps upon 
the rocks, showing its white teeth as if eager to devour 
the homes of men; when one thinks of the storms that 
rage furiously across the land and sea; when one thinks 
of volcanoes and eclipses and earthquakes and pesti- 
lences, he cannot wonder that so many races of men 
came to the conclusion that God is a vengeful Deity 
and must be placated and appeased. But here, in the 
heavens, is one phenomenon which is altogether harm- 
less and lovely. It does not speak of wrath. In it, 
there is no sign of threat. It is a word of mercy. 
After the storm, it comes like the smile of God. 

The Hebrew race never got away from the interpre- 
tation placed upon the rainbow in this early page of 
Genesis. When Ezekiel paints a picture of heaven, he 
wraps a rainbow ’round the throne of God; and when 
the Seer on Patmos looks into heaven he also sees a 
rainbow ’round God’s throne; and when the Angel, 
who is none other than the Son of God, comes down 
out of the clouds He comes with a rainbow on His 


THE RAINBOW 19 


head. This, then, is what the rainbow means in the 
Scriptures—it is an emblem of God’s mercy. 

What does it mean to your? ‘There are many 
features of it which are worthy of your attention. In 
the first place, the rainbow is a familiar sight. Every- 
body has seen it. There are some things in America 
that are to be found nowhere else. There are great 
sights in Europe which one cannot see in Africa or 
Australia. Asia has its wonders that are nowhere else 
reproduced. But there is no land over which God has 
not bent His rainbow. Every one of the continents has 
been made beautiful by it, and there is not an island 
of the sea, inhabited by a wretched tribe of savages, 
over which God has not bent the seven colours of the 
rainbow. If it be a word of mercy, it is His de- 
termination that every human being on the earth shall 
read it. 

The very size of the rainbow is uplifting. You 
cannot get it into a house. You cannot bring it inside 
the city gates. It is too vast for any enclosure made 
by man. It spans the world. It belongs to every- 
body. It unites commonwealths far removed. It gives 
a hint of the great thoughts and wide plans of God. 

It is old. The antiquity of it awes the heart. We 
talk about the Bible being an old book; the fact is, it 
is a very recent book compared with the rainbow. ‘The 
Bible was only published late yesterday afternoon, as 
it were, but the rainbow was published at a date which 
no man records. One might say that it is a toy God 
gave to man to play with in his infancy—something to 
appease his terror and to make him stop his crying. 
You might consider it a picture-book, printed in bright 
colours. Children always like picture-hbooks, and this 
is the earliest that God published for mankind: Itisa 


20 NATURE SERMONS 


sort of catechism in which the human mind is trained 
to think of Deity; it is a book of scripture—one of the 
oldest extant. 

It is a blessing which God does not allow us to have 
all the time. Some good things we have incessantly. 
Other things are granted us periodically. They are 
given to us, and then taken away, and then given to 
us again. Parents sometimes give their children pretty 
things to play with, and then, after a little while, take 
them and put them away promising the children that, 
by and by, if certain conditions are fulfilled, they shall 
have the privilege of playing with them again. So it 
is with God’s rainbows. They are such delicate, lovely 
things we cannot have them all the time, but, now and 
then, after a storm He lets us have one just to remind 
us that the storm is over, and that the order of Nature 
still abides. 

The rainbow speaks audibly of God. There is no 
doubt that God made the rainbow. Man has high pre- 
tensions and makes great claims, but no man ever yet 
claimed to have made the rainbow. ‘This is one of 
the declarations which cannot be disputed. It is in- 
creasingly difficult to make any assertion which some 
one is not determined to contradict, but here for once 
the minister can form a sentence to which no one can 
bring exception: ‘‘ God makes the rainbow.” 


Theatrical managers are adroit and skillful men; it | 


is wonderful the things they make. They can repro- 
duce houses to perfection, they can make a cellar or 
a garret, a parlour or a kitchen, a hovel or a palace— 
and make it so true to fact that you cannot believe 
you are looking upon a fictitious scene, manufactured 
for the hour. They can reproduce old palaces and 
mansions of Europe so faithfully that when, later on, 


THE RAINBOW 21 


you see those buildings in the Old World you say to 
yourself: “ How familiar all this looks! I must have 
been here before.” ‘Theatrical managers can reproduce 
the landscape, they can create hills and mountains, 
fields of grain, lovely valleys, and they can place a lake 
in the midst with pleasure boats upon it. They can 
reproduce many of the phenomena of Nature—light- 
ning, rain, snow, sand-storms—and they can make 
them so real that you find it difficult to believe they are 
sham. But no theatrical manager can successfully re- 
produce the rainbow. I have read of a man who in- 
vented a rainbow for theatrical uses, but it has not had 
a great success. It is a poor, tawdry, cheap affair. 
Only God makes rainbows. The scientist cannot make 
one—that is, he cannot make a big one; he can only 
make a little one. His rainbow may be genuine as 
far as it goes, but it does not go far. Only God can | 
make a rainbow that spans the world! 

The rainbow is a sign to us. We are living in a 
utilitarian age. We Americans are often laughed at 
because we are so prosaic. We are always thinking of 
the profit that is coming out of everything we see. If 
an American goes through a forest, instead of enjoy- 
ing the beauty of it, he thinks of how much timber 
could be cut from it and what it would bring in the 
market. If he walks along the bank of a river, in- 
stead of listening to the music of it and watching the 
shadows made by the trees that overhang its banks, he 
is likely to think of the mills that are built a little 
higher up, and to calculate the yearly output of these 
mills. Everybody has heard of the man who went to 
Niagara Falls, and came away lamenting that so much 
water was going to waste. We need the rainbow to 
remind us that a thing is useful if it is beautiful, and 


22 NATURE SERMONS 


that all beauty is a joy for ever. Beauty is a form of 
food. Man cannot live by bread alone, but by every 
word that proceeds out of the mouth of God—and one 
of the loveliest of His words is the rainbow. And 
yet, according to utilitarian standards how useless a 
rainbow is! You cannot raise anything init. No kind 
of grain will grow there. No kind of fruit will ripen 
there. It is as barren as a desert. You cannot build 
anything upon it, it can bear no weight whatever. You 
cannot cut it into pieces and build it into houses. It 
is absolutely unusable. You cannot make any mer- 
cantile use whatsoever of it. You can use almost 
everything in Nature,—the wind, the lightning, the 
tides, the waterfalls, the lakes—but you cannot use the 
rainbow. ‘There it stands, just beautiful, saying to us 
all the time: “‘ Beauty is its own excuse for being.” 

It is a sign reminding us that nothing valuable can 
be injured by analysis. The rainbow has been analyzed 
by scientists. Everybody now knows how it is made. 
{t is made of the simplest ingredients—a bowl of sun- 
beams poured over a few particles of water. ‘That is 
all. The story of its composition reads like a fairy 
tale. I would suggest to all boys and girls that, 
some day, they take down an encyclopedia and read 
what the scholars have to say about the rainbow. It 
is wonderful how intricate it all is. The very highest 
mathematics are necessary in order to deal with it. 
There are different theories to account for the appear- 
ance of it. But in spite of all the elaborate computa- 
tions the rainbow is just as lovely as it was when the 
man in the Book of Genesis wrote his description of 
it. You cannot spoil a rainbow by analyzing it. 

Haydon the English painter once held a dinner- 
party in the city of London to which he invited a 


THE RAINBOW 23 


company of distinguished men, among whom were the 
poets Wordsworth and Keats. In the course of the 
dinner Keats proposed a toast to the memory of New- 
ton. Wordsworth refused to drink the toast until 
Keats explained why he had proposed it. He re- 
fused to drink to the memory of Newton because 
he had taken the poetry out of the rainbow by reducing 
it to prismatic colours. Wordsworth was needlessly 
alarmed. ‘The poetry has not been taken from the 
rainbow, and it never will be. You cannot spoil any- 
thing by analysis. The eye has been analyzed, but it 
has not lost its lustre. We know a good deal about 
the aqueous humour and the vitreous humour, about 
the crystalline lenses and the different layers of the 
retina, but the eye is just as fascinating now as it was 
when it was first placed in the skull of man. You can- 
not spoil bread by analyzing it. It is just as nutritious 
to-day as it was before modern chemistry did its work. 
You cannot spoil water by saying that it 1s composed 
of hydrogen and oxygen. Its sparkle is just as bright 
and its power to quench thirst is just as great to-day 
as it was when the first man took a drink from the 
bubbling spring. 

You cannot spoil the Bible by analyzing it. Literary 
critics have been engaged in showing us that many of 
the books of the Scriptures are composite structures, 
made by different strands of tradition. They have 
proved this to be true of The Pentateuch, but, they 
have not destroyed The Pentateuch. After they have 
completed their work Abraham and Isaac and Jacob 
and Moses and Joseph still walk through those pages 
like the sons of God. ‘They say that The Psalter is 
composite. It was once supposed that David wrote al- 
most all the psalms; but now it is supposed that David 


24 NATURE SERMONS 


wrote hardly any of them. But no matter how many 
poetic voices are sounding in The Psalm-Book, men 
still repeat: ‘‘ The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not 
want,” and when they are bowed down with remorse 
they still continue to say: “Create in me a clean 
heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.” 
They say that The Gospels contain many interpola- 
tions, that the redactors have made alterations and ad- 
ditions. But after the analysis has all been done, the 
Man of Galilee still walks through those pages, the 
one matchless Figure of history, drawing all men unto 
Him. Analysis spoils nothing. 

Here, then, are a few of the lessons which we may 
carry with us from our study of the rainbow. God 
undoubtedly likes beauty. He is exceedingly fond of 
colour. If He is not, why should He paint the sky 
blue and the fields green? And why, every autumn, 
should He kindle a great conflagration of golden and 
purple fire in the Berkshire Hills in order to give men 
something to remember when the bleak days of winter 
come? I do not wonder that Ruskin always claimed, 
that of all the gifts that God gave to the human eye, 
nothing is so holy and sacred as colour. 

We ourselves are something like rainbows. Cole- 
ridge was one of the first to point this out. “‘ We are 
like rainbows,” he said, ‘‘ made up’of reflected splen- 
dour and our own tears.” Life is a series of alternat- | 
ing storms and calms. We are up to-day and down 
to-morrow. ‘To-day, the sky is blue, to-morrow, it is 
overcast. ‘The mind itself is a world, and storms are 
driven across its sky. Sometimes it is the storm of 
sorrow, sometimes the storm of doubt, sometimes the 
storm of disappointment, sometimes the storm of de- 
spondency and despair. But is not this true in all our 


THE RAINBOW 25 


experience—that after the storm comes the rainbow? 
Our life is not uninterruptedly dark. The storm does 
not last for ever. After the tempest comes God’s smile. 

The Bible makes use of the rainbow. It says that 
when you pass through the waters you will not be 
overwhelmed, when you pass through the fire you will 
not be burned. What is that but putting the bow in 
the cloud in the day of rain? ‘ Now no chastisement 
for the present seemeth to be joyous, but grievous, but ~ 
afterward ”—there, again, you have the bow in the 
cloud. “ Your sorrow shall be turned into joy.” 
“What I do, you know not now, but you shall know 
hereafter.” The Gospel is the light from heaven which, 
falling on our tears, creates a rainbow which spans the 
heavens. We are saved by hope. What is Christ 
Himself but God’s rainbow, the emblem of God’s 
grace, God’s sign, God’s promise of mercy? When we 
look upon Him we cannot be afraid. After the storm 
has passed, we see again His shining face. 

The commemoration of Memorial Sunday reminds 
us of the awful storm which swept across this country 
more than half a century ago. In the terrible days 
when the storm was raging there was no rainbow, 
but now the storm is passed and a wondrous rainbow 
arches the sky. Within the next few days thousands 
of orations will be delivered in all parts of the country 
breathing fraternity and sympathy and good will. 
What are these but a rainbow—a sign that God is still 
with us—a promise that civil war will never again 
submerge the land? 


Tit 
DESERTS 


HERE are three kinds of deserts upon the 
surface of the earth. ‘The first desert is 
made of water. The ocean is barren, noth- 

ing grows upon it, no grass or flowers or grain. It 
has no human inhabitants, there are no cities built 
upon it. Men pass over it in mighty ships, but they 
pass in order to reach cities which have foundations. 
The poet has well described the sea when he says: 


“ Old ocean’s gray and melancholy waste.” 


The second desert is made of snow. In the Arctic 
and Antarctic regions there are great fields of ice. 
These are barren. To be sure, a few things grow 
there, but every form of life is stunted, and these vast 
reaches are well-nigh uninhabited. They are not the 
home of commerce or of art. No great cities have 
ever risen in those icy regions. ‘They are sections of 
the great desert-regions of the earth. Men pass across 
the snow as they pass across the water; they do not 
tarry long, their home is somewhere else. 

The third kind of desert is the desert of sand, and 
it is to that kind of desert to which I invite your at- 
tention. Like the other deserts already mentioned, the 
desert of sand is barren. There are a few forms of 
life, but only a few. ‘The soil is barren because of 
the lack of water. Great regions lie blasted and 
blistered by the sun. Men pass through the desert, 
but they do not tarry there. There is a great desert 


Preached, June 8, 1913. 
206 


DESERTS 27 


in Australia, another in Arabia. We have a vast one 
here, in our own country. But as everybody knows, 
the greatest desert on the earth is the Sahara in Africa. 
Deserts, then, whether made of water, or ice, or sand, 
are a conspicuous feature of the natural world. 

When we begin to study deserts, we find ourselves 
face to face with an impenetrable mystery. ‘That is 
what we always find when we study Nature. Men 
sometimes speak as if there were no mysteries outside 
the spiritual world; as a matter of fact, the natural 
world is also filled with them. Tennyson plucks a 
flower from the wall, holds it in his hand and finds 
in it a beautiful mystery, and declares that if he could 
only understand that little flower, he could under- 
stand man and God. Horace Bushnell in his interest- 
ing book entitled The Moral Uses of Dark Things, 
closes his list of dark things with the ocean. What a 
mysterious thing it is, when you stop to think about it, 
that four-fifths of the earth should be covered with 
water! Man is a land animal and was created to live 
on the land. The earth was created to be his home, 
and yet only one-fifth of the earth’s surface is land. 
There is only a little land and the amazing thing is 
that so much of that little is uninhabited. Man can- 
not live amid the eternal snows. He can stay there 
for a season, but he cannot abide there permanently, 
and yet a considerable part of all the earth’s land area 
has been covered for countless thousands of years with 
a blanket of ice and snow. Man cannot prosper in 
regions of sand scorched by the sun, and yet there are 
vast regions of the earth given up to the sand. The 
Sahara desert is as large as the United States. Leav- 
ing out Norway, Sweden and Iceland, it is almost as 
large as Europe. God has thrown down on our planet 


28 NATURE, SERMONS 


a few rugs, some of them white, some of them yellow, 
some of them blue, and some of them green. He has 
said to humanity, “ Keep off the rugs that are white, 
and yellow and blue. You may pass over them if you 
please, but you must not tarry on them long. It is 
My good pleasure that you should make your home on 
the rugs that are green.’”’ Verily this is a great mys- 
tery. 

But however mysterious the desert we are bound to 
acknowledge that it is one of God’s creations. We 
are in danger of forgetting this. When we suddenly 
come upon a magnificent landscape—it may be some 
beautiful valley with a river running through it, or 
some great prairie golden with grain—we involuntarily 
exclaim: “ This is God’s country!’ When we look out 
upon a region made up entirely of rock and sand, we 
say: “ What a God-forsaken place this is!” We are 
ready to acknowledge the handiwork of the Creator in 
the things that are beautiful and fruitful; it is difficult 
for us to discern Infinite wisdom and skill in the things 
that are blasted and ugly. It is not easy, then, to bear 
always in mind that the desert was created by an in- 
finitely wise God. 

Nor does the Bible help us much in our appreciation 
of the desert. The Hebrew heart was sensitive to 
many parts of the natural world, but there were two 
things to which it never was able to do justice: it never 
responded to the sea and it never responded to the 
desert. You hear the Hebrew poet saying: “ When I 
consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon 
and the stars which thou hast ordained,” but you never 
hear any Hebrew poet saying: ‘“‘ When I consider thy 
desert the work of thy fingers, the sand-storm and the 
sand-dunes which thou hast ordained.’’ Hebrew music 


DESERTS 29 


never reaches that lofty pitch. In the one hundred 
and forty-seventh Psalm the poet makes a catalogue of 
the works of God. He begins with the stars, and then 
enumerates the features of creation one after the 
other: clouds, rain, grass, beasts, birds. It delights 
him to feel that God sends the snow like wool, casts 
forth His ice like morsels, that at His will the warm 
winds blow, the snows melt, the waters flow. ‘This 
poet is exceedingly appreciative of the wonders of the 
world, but he has nothing to say about deserts. He 
does not include the desert in his list. 

In the one hundred and forty-eighth Psalm another 
Hebrew poet invites the whole of creation to make a 
church. He wants to organize a great choir and set 
everybody singing. He invites everybody and every- 
thing. He begins at the very top of the universe. 
His first invitation goes to the angels and all the 
heavenly hosts; then he includes the sun and the moon 
and the stars; dropping down to the earth, he invites 
the ocean and the dragons that sport in their deeps. 
He also extends an invitation to fire and hail, snow 
and vapour, and all the winds of the storms. He 
next invites the mountains and the hills, and all kinds of 
trees—fruitful trees and forest trees. He desires that 
every one shall come. He invites every kind of beast, 
both wild and domestic. He asks the birds to come, 
and also the snakes, everything that crawls, is exhorted 
to praise the Lord. And having invited all inanithate 
creation, all the lower world, all the beasts and the 
birds, he extends his invitation to humanity. He be- 
gins with kings and princes and judges, and runs down 
to the little children. No one is omitted, no part of 
the earth is left out—except the desert. The Hebrew 
poet does not invite the desert to come to church. He 


30 NATURE SERMONS 


does not seem to know that the desert can sing. It is 
counted a heathen and a publican. 

And yet it is undoubtedly true that God made the 
desert. If He did not make it, who did? Man never 
made it. Only the Almighty could make such a won- 
derful thing as a desert. He made it by two of His 
most wonderful servants, the sun and the wind. It is 
because the sun and the wind work together that we 
have any deserts at all. The first thing that the wind 
does is to clear of moisture a space in the air. No 
rain-clouds are allowed to come into a certain region 
of the sky. The wind keeps them away. ‘This gives 
the sun a chance to fall upon the earth with unob- 
structed energy. The sun falls on the rocks. He heats 
them burning hot. There is no moisture in the air to 
obstruct him. He does his fierce pleasure, and then he 
goes away, and there being no moisture in the air, the 
radiation is rapid and the rocks cool. The sudden 
heating and the sudden cooling breaks them, crushes 
them, pulverizes them, reduces them to sand. It is 
then that the wind begins its great work. It takes the 
sand in its hands and it scatters it, scatters it for miles 
and miles. It uses it as a polishing agency, and it 
scours the faces of the cliffs until they are smooth as 
ice. It is in this way that the wind makes more sand. 
And after it has made it in great abundance, it plays 
with it. It throws it into the air, sometimes in columns 
rising two thousand feet above the earth. And after 
it has made this column of sand it sends it moving 
across the earth. Why, nobody knows. It would seem 
that even the sand likes to play. The wind loves the 
sand. It is always toying with it. It makes things 
out of it. It says: “I will now make an imitation of 
the sea when the sea is blown upon by a gentle breeze, 


DESERTS 31 


IT will make undulations out of sand, I will make a 
vast ocean with yellow waves ’”—and it does all this. 

You can stand upon the desert and look out toward 
the horizon and feel that you are looking out across 
a golden ocean, every wave kissed by the sun. And 
then again the wind says: “ I will now make an imita- 
tion of the ocean tossed by storm,” and it moulds the 
sand into great billows like the billows of the sea, 
large and wild and yellow. One can look out across 
their crests, for miles and miles, and feel that this is 
indeed a sea—a sea of sand. 

And when the wind is in a different mood it plays 
with the sand as little children play with it on the 
seashore. It piles it into hillocks which we call dunes. 
It piles it into ridges, ramparts, forms that look like 
old fortifications. Sometimes it piles it into hills and 
almost into mountains. The formation of the desert 
is exceedingly varied. Those who have never given 
attention to the desert, either in books or travel, have 
the idea that the desert is always flat. They are mis- 
taken. There are flat places in the desert, but not all 
of the desert is level. There is just as great variety in 
the desert as in the fertile regions of the earth. There 
are hills and there are valleys, there are plateaus and 
there are prairies, and there are also lofty mountains. 
There are mountains in the Sahara rising as high as 
seven thousand feet above the sea, and in our own 
desert in Colorado there are mountains over ten thou- 
sand feet in height. If you could strip the Empire 
State of all its foliage, you would have a region not a 
whit more varied in its topography than are many of 
the deserts of the world. 

The desert, then, is made by sun and wind; and what 
are the sun and wind but servants of Almighty God? 


32 NATURE SERMONS 


They could not do what they do if they were not 
commanded. ‘The Hebrew poet was right when he 
said that stormy winds are ministers of His and ful- 
fill His word. I like the Arabs’ word for desert. They 
call it “‘ The Garden of Allah ’—that is, “ The Garden 
of God.” We do not ordinarily associate the word gar- 
den with the thought of Deity, we always think of it 
in connection with man. In a garden, there is al- 
ways something more or less conventional, artificial. 
In a garden, things are trimmed and trained and tied. 
We have our landscape gardeners, and they are ex- 
ceedingly clever men. They can take almost any tract 
of territory and convert it into a thing of beauty. 
They have a trick of getting the flowers to grow in 
beds and the trees to grow in clumps. They know 
where to toss in a pretty little lake and at what spot 
to erect an artistic bridge. 

It is all quite charming, but, to my mind, there 
is something more beautiful than anything which 
a landscape gardener ever did. I know woodlands 
in New England that run far beyond any garden 
that an artist ever made, woodlands where the 
trees all grow just as they please, where vine and 
ivy cling as they please, and where every little flower 
takes the place that suits it. And when I look upon 
that loveliness, I know that it has been created by the 
supreme Landscape Gardener. God can make gardens 
as well as men. ‘The desert is the Garden of God. 
There is nothing in it which has been trimmed, 
nothing there has felt the touch of man’s training 
hand, nothing there is tied. Everything is precisely 
as it was when it left the hand of God. O Arab! 
you are right, your name is perfect—the desert is the 
Garden of God! 


DESERTS ie 


We always associate a garden with the idea of the 
beautiful; and those who are not familiar with the 
desert might be inclined to say that the name is mis- 
placed when applied to it. To the imagination of many 
the desert is anything but beautiful; it is a place of 
ugliness and horror; it is a charnel-house with the 
grinning skulls of men and the bleached carcasses of 
animals; it is a region of desolation in which only 
poisonous insects and reptiles make their home; it is 
a vast stretch of monotonous sand. But those who 
really know the desert, know that it is beautiful. One 
beauty differs from another beauty in glory. ‘The 
beauty of the desert is not the beauty of the Hudson 
valley, nor of the Dakota prairie; it has a beauty of 
its Own. 

It is a mistake to imagine that there is only one 
colour in the desert. It is true that the desert is pre- 
vailingly yellow, but there are a thousand shades of 
yellow. There is the yellow of buff and the yellow 
of amber; there is the orange yellow, there is the yel- 
low of gold. There are yellowish whites and whitish 
yellows and grayish yellows and yellowish grays, yel- 
lowish browns and brownish yellows, yellowish reds 
and reddish yellows; and all these are changing with 
every hour of the day. They are one thing in the 
morning before the sun is up, and quite another thing 
when the sun, peeping above the horizon, throws his 
rays through strata of air saturated with fine particles 
of sand. Quite another thing is the desert, at noon, 
and a thousand other things it becomes when the sun 
goes down, and quite another thing, still, when the 
starlight falls on it and it becomes pallid and ethereal 
and wan. Experts in colour tell us that we must go 
to the desert to learn delicacy of tint and exquisite- 


34 NATURE SERMONS 


ness of tinge. No one would ever say that the desert 
is not beautiful who had ever camped for a night on 
the sand. 

When I look down the Connecticut valley at North- 
field, in summer, I am delighted by the infinite variety 
in its shades of green. God must love green because 
He makes so many shades of it; so also must He love 
yellow, for the shades of it are infinite in number. 
Yellow is more exciting to our eye than green because 
we are less accustomed to it, and when one looks out 
upon the desert he feels he is looking upon a world 
the like of which he has never before seen. It seems 
almost as though some one were holding a coloured 
glass before the eyes in order to make the world look 
like enchantment. 

Ordinarily we associate a garden with fragrance. 
In a garden there is always the suggestion of per- 
fume. “ Certainly there is no fragrance in the desert,” 
you may say. “ How can you get perfume when you 
have no trees, no plants, no grasses?’’ Who told you 
that there are no shrubs or grasses, no flowers or 
blossoms in the desert? There are. Not only does 
every desert have its oases, but, here and there, there 
are shrubs and flowering plants. I have always 
thought that if I were a botanist I should love to de- 
_ vote myself to the plants of the desert. There is some- 
' thing about them that bewitches me. They are so 
| heroic, their powers of endurance are marvellous, they 
_ seem to defy the sun and the sand, they live right on in 

| spite of almost incredible opposition. They devise the 
_most curious methods for getting all the moisture they 
can and for making the utmost out of it. Heroic little 
plants!’ They have in them the very courage and en- 
durance of the Son of God Himself, and they give 


DESERTS 35 


out, many of them, a faint but exquisite perfume. It, 
is with flowers as it is with people. Oftentimes the 
lives that have been most oppressed and crushed ex- 
hibit the finest beauty. It is the hearts that have been 
compelled to resist the most cruel circumstances that 
have in them a loveliness which we find nowhere else. 
So it is with desert shrubs and desert flowers. The 
very fact that they are obliged to fight, day by day 
and night by night, for mere existence on the earth, 
gives them a peculiar fragrance which seems to be 
brought from some far-off, celestial world. These 
faint and delicate odours steal across the sand. There 
is no moisture in the air and therefore nothing to im- 
pede their onward progress. ‘They will travel for 
miles to greet you, and now and then it seems as 
though you were breathing an atmosphere wafted from 
some hidden paradise. 

What an odourous place a city is! Our atmosphere 
is reeking with foul odours. Walk down almost any 
of our streets, and the nose is offended, again and 
again, by the odours that assail it. There is the smell 
of soot, of smoke, of the garbage-can, of escaping 
gases, all sorts of earthly smells stirred up by men 
who are digging in the streets, bringing to the sun- 
light soil that has been soaked in all kinds of pollu- 
tion. Pass into the houses—in the hallway a heavy 
smell, in the parlour a musty smell, in the bedrogm an 
unventilated smell, in the dining-room the smell of the 
kitchen. If it were not that our olfactory sense is 
dulled, we could not live in the city at all. We speak 
of ventilation—there is no ventilation in the city. In 
the desert, the ventilation is perfect. No chimneys to 
belch out soot and smoke, none of the thousand sources 
of contamination with which we are afflicted in great 


36 NATURE SERMONS 


cities. The desert air is clean, and because it is so 
clean, and because the desert shrubs and plants are so — 
heroic, their delicate odours steal across the sand to 
refresh and delight the weary traveller. Never think 
of the desert as being devoid of fragrance. 

What, then, is it possible for the desert to do for 
us? Itisa medium of revelation. It brings a message 
from the Most High. It gives us a new idea of sun- 
light. We hardly know what sunlight is. Our air is 
always filled with moisture, and the sunlight only 
comes dripping through. We are never exposed to 
the full glare of the sun, even on the days that are 
sunniest, but in the desert the sun falls through the 
air unobstructed and his light is well-nigh blinding. 
The world in which we live is dark. It eats up the 
sunbeams as soon as they fall. Green is especially 
greedy of light, and when the light falls on it it is 
extinguished. ‘The desert does not eat the sun, it 
keeps it. The sun throws down a flood of glory upon 
it and it lies there, and when you look out across 
the desert it seems to be burning like a fiery furnace, it 
seethes like an oven. We do not know what light is 
until the desert tells us, nor do we know the full range 
or the heavenly loveliness of colour. God is a great 
colourist, and He performs some of His very greatest 
miracles of colouring in the desert. In the desert the 
sun is not obstructed by vapour, it can make use of the 
sand. It can create the mirage, which is one of the 
loveliest of all veils. And the desert can put it on 
and lay it off at its will. 

The desert, too, gives us a new revelation of im- 
mensity. We get the revelation, to be sure, from the 
midnight sky. It has a wonderful, tranquillizing in- 
fluence on the heart. If one can look upon the night 


DESERTS a9 


sky for ten minutes and hold himself still for that long, 
one receives an impression which only immensity can 
give. But that is immensity in one of its forms only. 
If you stand on the prow of an ocean liner and look 
ahead of you toward the horizon, here you have both 
sky and sea, and again the heart is awed, but the im- 
pression is different from that which is given by the 
starry heavens. Look out upon the desert and you 
have immensity again, but it is different from the sky 
and it is different from the sea. ‘The sea is always 
restless. 


“The ocean old, centuries old, 
Strong as youth and as uncontrolled, 
Paces restless to and fro, 
Up and down the sands of gold.” 


The desert is still. The desert is not impatient. The 
desert suggests no restlessness. Here is immensity as 
immovable as marble, as calm as death. ‘The desert 
also gives us the revelation of silence. We are liv- 
ing in a noisy world. Many of us hardly know what 
silence is. There are different degrees and forms of 
silence. ‘There is a silence of the mountain-top, and 
there is a silence of the cave, and there is also the 
silence of the desert. I have felt the silence of the 
mountain-top in the Canadian Rockies, and it was an 
exhilarating silence, a silence that lifted the heart and 
excited it. I have felt the silence of the Mammoth 
Cave in Kentucky; it was an oppressive silence, a 
silence that was painful, and which became, at last, 
unendurable. I have felt the silence of the Libyan 
Desert, and it was different from the other two. It 
was an illuminating silence—it quieted and soothed the 
heart. One could understand why it is written in The 


38 NATURE SERMONS 


Psalier, as a word from the mouth of the Almighty: 
“ Be still, and know that I am God.” Here, then, in 
the desert we find another medium of revelation. A 
drop of water, a flake of snow, a grain of sand—these 
are three windows in the temple of matter through 
which we look out upon the Infinite. . 

But can the desert do anything more than awe us 
and charm us? Yes, it can cheer us. It can give us 
fresh hope. It has only recently dawned upon the 
human mind that the desert can be changed. For cen- 
turies it has remained one of the unchanging things in 
God’s universe. At one time man was afraid of the 
ocean. Little by little he learned to conquer it. To- 
day he feels he is master of it. Mountains were once 
barriers. Man has learned to chisel his way through 
them. But the desert, through all the centuries, has 
remained what it was at the beginning—erim, defiant, 
unconquerable. But a change has been coming over 
our dreams. Man is now dreaming of conquering the 
desert. It has been discovered that there is water 
under the desert. It is possible to bring the water to 
the surface and to make the desert bloom as the rose. 

When you go out to Heliopolis in Egypt, you find 
yourself in the midst of a wonderful city that has 
sprung up, as it were, out of the sand. ‘There is 
sand all around it, and you wonder how a city so 
magnificent could have grown there. Ask some one 
to explain to you the mystery, and he will tell you that 
they brought up water from beneath the sand. 

Out in our Colorado desert they have, by the skill- 
ful use of water, learned how to produce all kinds of 
fruits, right in the midst of regions that were held 
for centuries in the grip of the wind and the sand. 
Watermelons and cantaloupes, oranges and lemons, 


DESERTS 39 


pomegranates and figs, grapes and dates, some of the 
most luscious fruit grown upon the earth is now com- 
ing out of the Colorado desert. But shall we ever be 
able to do anything with the Sahara? Undoubtedly. 
The engineers are entertaining dreams. Some of them 
have already put their plans on paper. The Sahara 
will not be conquered to-day nor to-morrow, but, some 
day, it will be completely subdued by man. We make 
a mistake when we suppose that the desert is sand 
and sand only. There are sand-areas in the desert, but 
the most of the desert is not sand. Only one-third of 
the Sahara is sand; more than two-thirds of it are 
fertile soil, and the soil will bring forth rich harvests 
as soon as it is given water. What, then, seems to be 
hopeless barrenness is, after all, fertility waiting for 
water. | 

And this gives me hope for myself. ‘There have 
been, in my own nature, barren stretches which have 
produced no harvests for the glory of God. These, 
too, can be brought into cultivation if only my will- 
power co-operates with the grace of God. There are 
vast regions in society which seem absolutely aban- 
doned and hopeless, great stretches of human beings 
out of whom no fruits of civilization have ever come. 
But we shall not lose hope. This is not all sand, this 
is fertile soil. All it needs is the water of life, the 
water which is supplied by the Son of God. The 
desert can be made to bloom. That is true physically, 
it is also true spiritually. All deserts, no matter where 
they are, can be made to bring forth fruit to the glory 
of the God who made them. Oh, the depth of the 
riches, both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God, 
Who is able to make the desert blossom as the rose! 


IV, 
BIRDS 


ET me remind you at the start that I am not 
going to give you a lecture on ornithology. 
a. I have no ability as a lecturer, and I have no 

time to lecture. J am a preacher—a prophet. I am 

ordained to speak for God. My purpose is not to de- 
liver a scientific dissertation on birds, for 1 know 
almost nothing of birds from the scientific stand- 
point. There are many men in this city who can speak 
to you learnedly about the nature and habits and value 
of birds. My aim is not to impart information. You 
can readily get that for yourselves. All the public 
libraries and all the bookstores have many volumes 
on birds, and special magazines and newspapers can 
tell you all you need to know. My sermon is a sermon 

—a spiritual discourse. My wish is that I may be 

able to open your eyes a little and your ears a little, 

and your mind a little to the wonder and beauty of 
the bird-world, in order that you may cry out with 

a fresh rapture: “ O Lord our Lord, how excellent is 

thy name in all the earth.” 

What a mystery a bird is! Tennyson, in one of his 
best known poems, has said that if he knew a little 
flower completely, in all its essences and relationships, 
he would know everything. But a bird is a greater 
mystery than a flower. It has higher potencies and 
wider possibilities. Little, timid, quivering, fluttering, 
scary thing, what is it but a ball of mystery wrapped 
up in feathers! How strange that a thing like that 
Preached, June 14, 1914. 





40 


| BIRDS 4I 


should come out of the earth! How remarkable that 
it should come out of protoplasm: that one_pinch 
of protoplasm.,should be worked into a thing that 
swims, and another pinch into a thing that crawls, and 
another pinch into a thing that flies! How extra- 
ordinary that a bird should come out of the star-stuff! 
At first there was a great mass of stuff. Large pieces 
flew off and became stars, small pieces, tiny bits flew 
off and became birds. How amazing that a bird 
should come out of the fire-mist! In the huge ball of 
fire-mist the seeds of bird-life were hidden, and out of 
the mist there flew, in the fullness of time, a little 
creature with a spark of the primeval fire burning in 
its heart. Birds are the hottest of all creatures. They 
have a blood-temperature which would quickly bur 
us up. 

But how could a bird come out of protoplasm, star- 
stuff, fire-mist? Only because it was, first, in the mind 
of God. From eternity the bird idea was in the Divine 
Mind. One day God said: “ Let us make birds,” and 
they were made. He said that before He said: “‘ Let 
us make man.” Birds are older than man. We some- 
times look upon them as interlopers, troublesome in- 
truders, saucy upstarts, but they were here long before 
the first man made this planet his habitation. Accord- 
ing to a Greek tradition birds are the oldest of all 
created things. Before the sun and winds, before man- 
kind, even before the gods, they were. And it was 
because they were supposed to possess primal powers 
and to reach back into ante-mundane times that sooth- 
sayers watched their flight and ministers of religion 
tried to find out from them the will of God. eR 
_ Why did God create birds? A common answer 
is—He created them for man. That is pleasing to 


PPeme per Teyenerass psec terrmnrn en 


42 NATURE SERMONS 


our vanity, but it is hardly a tenable explanation of 
their existence. If birds were made for man, then 
why did they exist millions of years before man was 
made? Why did they fly and sing, age after age, when 
there was no human eye to see them and no human ear 
to hear them? And why, even to the present hour, 
do many of the most beautiful birds in. all the world 
make their homes in thickets and jungles and mighty 
forests, and on uninhabited islands where the foot of 
man has never trod? Why do they flash their gor- 
geous plumage in the sun, and pour their melodies on 
the air, where there is no human heart to enjoy them? 


a f It is true that God made birds for man and it is also 
‘! true that God made birds for Himself. He created 


‘ them because He wanted them. He wanted them for 


\ Himself. He now shares them with man, but He 


wants them Himself. He likes them. He likes their 
\ plumage and He likes their song. 

~ Abraham Lincoln used to say that God must like the 
common people because He makes so many of them. 

If that be a sound method of argument, then God must 
like birds because He makes so many of them. There 
are more kinds of birds than there are kinds of fish, 
and more than there are kinds of serpents, and more 
than there are kinds of animals. There are more 
species of birds than there are species of fish and 
serpents and animals combined. ‘The largest of all the 
kingdoms of sentient life is the kingdom of the 


“birds. I do not wonder that Jesus of Nazareth used 


y to say: “ Look at the birds!” God keeps His eye on 


them. Not one of them can fall without His noting 
its fall. Jesus felt that bird-life was a page in God’s 
great Bible, and that by reading this page men would 
receive a message from their heavenly Father. 


BIRDS 43 


This leads us to another mystery—the majority of 
mankind are indifferent to birds. Men ignore.them as 
unworthy of attention. Indeed, the human race may 
be said to be almost hostile to birds. Are there not 
societies organized for the express work of protect- 
ing them, and do not congresses and parliaments pass 
laws for the purpose of saving them from extermina- 
tion? Mr. Hornaday, of our own city, set himself 
to raise a fund of $100,000 to save a particular kind of 
bird from extinction. In New York birds have de- | 
creased forty-six per cent. But most men are not hos-? 
tile to birds,they-are-simply-indifferent to them, They 
do not care for them, never think about them, never 
read about them, simply pass them by as uninteresting 
and useless. ‘To be sure, there are exceptions. There 
are bird-lovers in every community, men and women 
who take unceasing delight in birds, and the number of 
these bird-lovers is increasing every year. But, at 
present, the majority of people are not interested in 
birds. 

This isamystery. Birds are easily seen. Fishes are 
not. Fishes hide. In order that fishes may be seen, 
the city must catch them and put them in an aquarium 
and carefully adjust the lights. It does not seem that 
fishes were created to be looked at. Serpents also 
hide. They conceal themselves in the grass, behind 
rocks, in holes in the ground, and even if we could 
see them we do not want to see them, for the sight 
of them causes a revulsion in our blood. But birds 
do not hide. They rise before us. They soar into 
the air. They wheel and circle above our heads, as if 
they would say: “ Now you like to see men looping 
the loop, and performing other aerial stunts, just look 
at us! See how gracefully we can do these things, 


4A NATURE SERMONS 


and how easily and without danger at all.” Birds do 
everything they can to attract our attention, but most 
of us refuse to look. 

Not only are they visible, but they are beautiful. 
They are beautiful in form, in movement, in colour. 
The colouring of birds is one of the miracles of crea- 
tion. In some of them the colours are splendid, in 
others they are gorgeous, in others they are posi- 
tively dazzling. Oh, the delicacy and vividness of 
the patterns woven into the plumage of a bird! 
We think it wonderful when men can bring to- 
gether bits of stone in such a way as to create those 
matchless mosaics in St. Peter’s at Rome. We 
count it marvellous that men can create such de- 
signs as one sees in the priceless tapestries of the 
Vatican; but all these masterpieces of human artistry 
are poor, cheap, faded things compared with the 
splendour of some of the most common of our birds. 
When you want to see delicate shadings, exquisite 
gradations of colour, and artistic designs that cannot 
be matched in the studios and. factories of men, go to 
the breast or the wing of a bird! There are more 
rich and vivid colours in the plumage of birds than 
you can find in the foliage of a landscape on a summer 
afternoon, more than you can see in the ocean when it 
breaks against the rocks and the sunlight is mingled 
with the spray, more than you will find in the sky, 
even when the day is breaking or when the sun is 
dying in the west. This colour in the plumage of 
birds is the Lord’s doing, and it ought to be marvellous 
in our eyes. Feathers do not come together to form 
exquisite patterns with every line unbroken and every 
matching of colour perfect, without a superintending 
mind. But most of us do not care. 


BIRDS 45 


Birds, again, are vocal. It is difficult for birds to 
keep still. They are always chattering or twittering 
or chirping or calling or singing. ‘They are so full 
of life they cannot keep silent. By their singing they 
say: “ Please listen to us!” But we turn a deaf ear. 
Most of us do not care for birds. | 

And yet they follow us. They like us. They come 
into the city. ‘They take possession of all our parks. 
Central Park, New York, has nearly one hundred and 
fifty different kinds of birds within its bounds every 
year. But birds are not aristocratic. They do not 
confine themselves to stately parks. They will visit 
your backyard—anybody’s backyard—no matter how 
poor or mean you are, provided you have a tree or 
even a bush there. A woman in Chicago counted fifty- 
seven kinds of birds which in one year visited her 
backyard. Is it not strange that we should ignore 
them when they are so beautiful, so musical, and so 
friendly 

How many birds do you know? How many kinds 
of birds live in our city? How many are here in the 
winter, how many in the summer, how many all 
through the year? How many transients do we enter- 
tain in the course of every twelve calendar months? 
Birds are coming and going all the time, just as 
people are coming and going. We are interested in 
city life—well, bird-life is a part of city life, and 
most of us ought to know more about it than we do. 

One object of this sermon, then, is to persuade you 
to pay attention to birds, to look at them, to listen 
to them, to think about them, to come to like them. 
This.is.one.of your religious privileges, this is one of 
the means of grace. God makes the birds. ‘They are 
parts of His ways. He has something to say to you 


46 NATURE SERMONS 


through them. If you ignore the birds, you lose a 
part of His message. | 

This sermon is specially for boys. Many boys do 
not think of birds. Because they do not think, they 
throw stones at them. A stone may break a bird’s 
wing. A bird with one wing broken cannot use the 
other wing, and so it has no wings at all. A bird 
with no wings is helpless, ruined. It is in the same 
condition that a boy would be in if some one put out 
both of his eyes or cut off both of his legs. This 
sermon is specially for girls. Girls do not think about 
birds, and that is why some girls wear the dead bodies 
of birds on their hats. Saige of the loveliest species 
‘of birds have become almost extinct because of the 
thoughtlessness and cruelty of girls and women. 

it ee sermon is specially for grown-up people. None 
of us perhaps are as happy as we ought to be. We 
are not so happy as we might be if we were interested 
in a larger circle of things. Having eyes we see not, 
having ears we hear not, and having hearts we feel 
not the things we might see and hear and feel. The 
result is that we get old early. Nobody gets.old_so 
long as he is eee in a large number of things. 
All of us know men and women in the upper eighties 
or early nineties who are yet young, because they are 
interested in so many things. ‘This sermon is to remind 
| |you that if you are not interested in birds you will 
‘get old before your time. This sermon is specially for 
the old, for the men and women who realize they are ° 
old, who find the days somewhat tedious and who [a> 
ment that much of the zest has gone out of life. Let 
me suggest that you enter the bird-world. Buy one 
of Charles M. Chapman’s books and go to work. Be- 
gin this summer. Begin to-day. Introduce the bird- 


BIRDS 47 


note into your life. You are going down the western 
side of the hill. Let the birds—God’s choristers—sing 
for you all the way down until the shadow falls and 
you hear other voices sweeter still. 

The bird-world is a fascinating field of study. One 
can devote his leisure hours to it for a lifetime and 
always have something new to learn. Every feature of 
bird-life is bewitching. The flying of birds—what a 
feat that is! Men have learned to fly in recent years; 
yet a sorry mess they often make of it. Look at the 
airplane! What a noisy thing itis! It makes a great 
ado, and every now and then it gets out of order, and 
comes tumbling to the earth, killing the man who is 
learning how to fly. But a bird dank. nothing of 
flying. A bird is God’s flying machine. In the 
machine there is a little engine—the bird’s heart—not 
so large as the tip end of your little finger. How tiny, 
and yet how mighty! It can carry the bird a thou- 


sand miles, two thousand, three, four, five, six thou- ' 


sand miles. Some birds spend their summers in the 


Arctic circle and their winters in Argentina. Twelve | 
thousand miles a year they fly, just for the sake of | 


being comfortable. 

And how fast they fly—some birds a mile a minute, 
others, two miles a minute. Experts declare that 
certain birds can fly three miles a minute. Against 
what obstacles they fly—right in the teeth of the wind, 
straight through the storm, on they go to their destina- 
tion. What energy is locked up in those little engines! 
The albatross is a mighty bird. It measures, some- 
times, seventeen feet between the tips of its out- 
stretched wings. It can fly day and night for three 
thousand miles, as fast as the fastest steamer can 
sail, sleeping on the wing, if it sleep at all, and at the 


Jy 


48 NATURE SERMONS 


end of the journey be apparently as fresh as it was 
when it started. And it flies without any observable 


movement of its wings. In the presence of such_a ' 


bird the heart cries out: *O, Lord, how manifold are 
thy works! In wisdom hast thou made them ail!” 

The migration of birds—you can study that for a 
lifetime. Many birds spend one season of the year 
in one country, and another season in a different 
country. The countries may lie thousands of miles 
apart. ‘They lay out courses of travel and they follow 
these courses for thousands of years. They start 
south at the same time every year. They start north 
at a time that never varies. The experts can tell you 
almost to the day when certain birds will be here from 
the West Indies, when other birds will be here from 
Brazil, when still others will be here from Patagonia. 
They fly often at night. They fly in great armies. 
Sometimes they fly so low you can hear them shouting 
and calling to one another, at other times they fly high 
and can be seen only through the telescope passing 
across the silver disk of the moon. ‘The tides of the 
ocean are wonderful, so certain, regular and mighty. 
But there are other tides, tides of feathered life, flow- 
ing north and south, with the regularity of the trade 
winds and the precision of the movement of the stars, 
and these tides of bird life have ebbed and flowed 
every year through all the ages of human history, and 
through uncounted millenniums before history began. 
“O the depths of the riches both of the wisdom and 
knowledge of God! how wunsearchable are his judg- 
ments and his ways past finding out!” 

The economic uses of birds—the millions of dollars 
| ‘they save us by making war on the enemies of our 
orchards and crops, this is an interesting study, and 


> 


BIRDS 49 


a still more interesting study is the poetic uses of birds. 
What use did Homer make of them, Dante, Shake- 
speare, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning, our own 
American poets? Shakespeare, the world’s greatest 
poet, apparently loved birds the best. Six hundred 
times in his dramas he brings them in, and some- 
times with magic effect. In the love scene in Romeo 
and Jultet, in the moment of intensest passion a bird 
is heard and the maiden cries: 


“It was the nightingale : 
Believe me, love, it was the nightingale.” 


But Romeo better understands the notes of birds 
and his reply comes sadly: 


“Tt was the lark, the herald of the dawn, 
No nightingale 


How did the Hebrew poets deal with birds? They 
saw in them a partial revelation of God. They noticed 
how birds will break up their nests and train their 
young ones to fly. So does God break up men’s rest- 
ing places. He wants men to soar aloft. The tender- | | 


| 
i 


ness and solicitude and faithfulness of the mother- bird | | | 
made a profound impression on the Hebrew heart. | | 
The downy softness, the warm tenderness, and the all- 
surrounding security of the protecting wings were 
hints, the poet thought, of qualities ae ae. in ‘the 
heart of the Eternal. There was an old poet of Israel 
who did not hesitate to think of God under the image | 
of a bird: ‘‘ He will cover thee with his feathers, and | 
under his wings shalt thou trust.” ; 
Birds are man’s companions in every quarter of the 
globe, and yet they are removed from him by a gulf 


50 NATURE SERMONS 


both deep and wide. They do not come so close to 
him as a horse, or a dog, or a cat. They do not like 
to be held in the hand. They resent a caress. They 
cannot talk to us as a dog can. It is impossible for 
them to express in any way which we can under- 
stand what they think or feel or wish. They cannot 
look us in the eye, nor can we look into their eye. 
They look at us but they do not look into us. Mat- 
thew Arnold had a dog—* Rover ”—-and when Rover 
died, Arnold wrote no poem. He had a cat named 
“‘ Atossa,’ and when Atossa died he wrote no elegy. 
He had a bird named “ Matthias,” and when Mat- 
thias died, Arnold wrote a poem expressive of his 
remorse and sorrow. His heart was pierced because 
he had not known the bird was going to die. He had 
not suspected even that the bird was sick. He had 
offered him sugar and cake and seed, and had spoken 
jocosely to the bird even when he was under the 
shadow of death, and it was this sense of ignorance 
and inability to understand a bird that wrung from 
Arnold’s heart one of the most beautiful poems he 
ever penned. 

But though we cannot understand them birds are 
company for us. ‘They relieve our loneliness. They 
, are comrades along the perilous road. They never 
' forsake us. They are faithful to the end. One of 
the darkest features of the tragedy of human life is — 
_ its increasing loneliness as the years multiply. One by 
_ one, our friends, our acquaintances, our companions in 
| pleasure and work, leave us. The boys and girls we 
_ played with when we were children, our schoolmates, 
our friends of the early years, drop out, one by one, 
and we find ourselves attended by an ever diminish- 
ing company of those who care whether we are alive 


BIRDS SI 


or not. Charles Lamb was not an old man when he 
wrote: 


“T have had playmates, I have had companions, 
In my days of childhood, in my joyful schooldays— 
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.” 


Tom Moore was not aged when he wrote: 


“TI feel like one 
Who treads alone 

Some banquet hall deserted, 
Whose lights are fled, 
Whose garlands dead 

And all but he departed!” 


But he who makes friends with the birds will have 
them with him to the end. Birds never change. So 
far as you are concerned they never die. You prob- 
ably never saw one die. You never saw its body after 
it was dead. There are just as many pewees and 
juncos, sparrows and swallows, orioles and robins as 
there ever were. And they do not change either their 
form or their colour or their voice. ‘The robin will 
sing to you this summer just as he sang when you 
first heard him sing, and the whippoorwill will speak 
to you out of the dusk with the same accent which he 
used long years ago. No matter how old you live to 
be, when it comes time to die—if you die in the sea- 
son of the singing of birds—if the window is open—. 
you will hear the birds singing the same songs which 
they sang to you when you were a child. ‘There are} 
two things which never forsake us—the stars and the’ 
birds. | 

And although they cannot look into our eyes they 
can sing their way into our hearts. Martin Luther, 


52 NATURE SERMONS 


in an hour of terrible depression, was lifted up and 
strengthened by the spectacle of a little bird swinging 
on a twig and sending forth a song of perfect trust. 
Thomas Carlyle walked one day to Edinburgh on a 
disagreeable errand, and on his way home his heart 
was heavy with care. But the larks rising and sing- 
ing around him made him think of his father’s house, 
and he was comforted. Dan Crawford, years ago, 
went as a missionary to Central Africa. He sat one 
day on a cliff overhanging a lovely lake, feeling as 
desolate as Robinson Crusoe felt before he found his 
man Friday. While he was pondering the fact that 
Scotland was four thousand miles from where he sat, 
suddenly there came the tapping of a woodpecker on 
a tree immediately behind him. “What a warm- 
hearted tap that is!” he said, and, at once, it seemed 
that Scotland was just round the next bend of the lake. 

In one of the finest of his poems, Wordsworth tells 
the experience of a poor woman who went every 
morning to her humble work in a crowded part of 
London. On her way she passed a corner at which 
hung a thrush in a cage. When the thrush sang there 
came before her eyes the cottage in which she was 
born. She saw the path through the meadows along 
which she had tripped with her milk-pail when a girl, 
she saw the woods, the mountain, and the river. ‘The 
whole scene of her childhood rose before her, as by 
enchantment, at the singing of this bird. 

Charles Silvester Horne was one of the radiant and 
anointed spirits of our time. For many years he was 
Pastor of Whitefield’s Tabernacle in Tottenham Court 
Road, London. He was elected to the British House 
of Commons and wherever he was, he was a cham- 
pion of noble causes, the loyal servant of mankind. 


BIRDS 53 


Horne’s death came when he was but fifty, and when 
he died a darkness fell upon the hearts of those who 
knew and loved him. It was a sad-hearted company 
which gathered round his open grave. ‘They had lined 
it with moss and wild flowers, but they could not cover 
up the wound in their hearts. Mrs. Horne was there 
with her seven children, Horne’s two brothers and his 
sisters were there, and a large company of men of 
distinction who had been his comrades in many a hard- 
fought campaign. When the minister began.to read 
the committal service, and every heart was at the point 
of breaking, a thrush in the oak-tree poured forth a 
jubilant song. The human heart was not able just 
then to say: “O death, where is thy victory? O death 
where is thy sting?” and so God said it through a 
bird. 

The most original poem ever written by an Ameri- 
can_bears the name of a bird—The Raven. It is by 
Edgar Allan Poe. The weirdest poem ever written 
by an Englishman telling the story of how a curse fell 


on a man for the killing of a bird, is The Rime of the 


Ancient Mariner, written by Samuel Taylor Cole- 
ridge. For days the hero’s life was a long-drawn 
agony. Because of the softening of the man’s heart 
the curse was finally lifted, and the poem closes with 
the noble thought: 


“ He prayeth best, who loveth best 
All things both great and small; 
For the dear God, who loveth us, 
He made and loveth all.” 


"4 
SUNSETS 


OW many sunsets have you seen during this 
H last week, this last month, this last year? 
How many have you seen in the last ten 
years, the last twenty, the last thirty? JI do not ask 
how many have you glanced at, but how many have 
you gazed upon, paid attention to, pondered? On how 
many have you held your mind long enough for it 
to become impressed, for an influence to be diffused 
through your heart, for a discipline to be exercised 
upon your spirit? How many sunsets stand out vivid 
and glorious on the walls of your memory? How 
many of you can say, that the glory of setting suns is 
an appreciable factor in the development of your 
emotional and spiritual life? 

It is a lamentable fact, that what is customary soon 
becomes commonplace. ‘The oft-repeated soon loses 
its power over us. Repetition seems to sear the heart 
as if by a red-hot iron. If the sun went down only 
once in a hundred years what a world-wide commo- 
tion the sunset would create! If only once in a hun- 
dred years the western sky glowed and burned as 
though some colossal, celestial glory were about to 
burst through upon the world; if only once in a hun- 
dred years, the clouds along the western horizon took 
on unwonted brilliancy, flashing with a magnificence 
leaping beyond the power of language to express or 
the ingenuity of the human mind to conceive; if, only 
once in a century, after the sun went down, an ethereal 
softness began to steal toward the zenith, and an un- 


Preached, May 23, 1915. 
54 


SUNSETS 55 


speakable beauty began to flush the upper spaces—then 
‘the fame of the spectacle would be heralded around 
the earth, and would give people something to talk 
about for another hundred years. 

If such an event had taken place seventy-five years 
ago, how enthusiastically we should gather round the 
old men and women of eighty and eighty-five and 
ninety, begging them to tell us of the sunset which 
they saw in the days of their childhood. And how 
eagerly the reporters would harass these old people for 
descriptions of the great event of the long ago. And 
if we knew that there would not be another sunset 
until twenty-five years from now, some of us would 
be filled with sadness, saying one to another, “I am 
afraid I shall not live so long. I fear I shall die be- 
fore I have seen that thrilling and sublime event!” 
Young people, however, would stand on the tiptoe of 
expectation, counting the passing years, reading the 
poets and historians for descriptions of the last sunset, 
and preparing their minds and hearts for the great 
experience awaiting them a quarter of a century from 
now. If a sunset took place once in a century, every- 
body would be interested in it, but such is the per- 
versity of human nature that a sunset occurring every 
day loses its power to charm or thrill, and the majority 
of human beings now living on our planet pay no more 
attention to a sunset than do the animals at their feet. 
We never rightly value anything which happens every 
day. We cannot appreciate any blessing which we 
possess all the time. 

Nor do we appreciate anything which we get for 
nothing. The only things we value highly are the 
things which we buy at a great cost. We should all 
enjoy the sunsets more, if we had to pay an admission 


56 NATURE SERMONS 


fee. If some enterprising showman could curtain off 
the western sky, and, walling in the edge of the world, 
should advertise in all the papers: “ Beautiful Sunsets 
every evening next week—best seats ten dollars 
each; seats in the balcony five and four and three dol- 
lars according to location; gallery seats one dollar 
each,”’ what a scramble there would be to get in! We 
should all want to go, and the ticket-scalpers would 
do a booming business. We should save up our money 
for this great treat, and we should ask one another: 
“How many times do you expect to go? Which sun- 
sets have you seen this season? ’’—just as we now talk 
about grand opera. Yes; if it only cost something to 
see the sunset we should be eager to see it. But be- 
cause an angel of the Lord stands in the glory of the 
blazing west, crying, ‘“Ho, ye who thirst for beauty, 
come ye to the fountain, come, without money and 
without price,’ we turn on our heel and go away. We 
do not want things which are free. 

And so, every evening of the month, thousands and 
tens of thousands of our people go from their places 
of business to their homes with never a glance toward 
the gorgeous west. They hastily eat their dinner. 
They return down town, paying for a place in the 
opera house or theatre in order to see the burning 
of some cheap chemicals, the dexterous manipulation 
of a searchlight or a few electric bulbs—ingenious 
tricks played with the mystery of light, cheap and 
tawdry flashes in a tin-pan—when God’s great master- 
piece of light and colour hangs all unnoticed on the 
western wall of the world. 

The purpose of my sermon is to awaken in you the 
sense of condemnation, the consciousness of sin be- 
cause of your neglect of this great feast of the Lord. 


SUNSETS 57 


would have you think of the sunset as a means of 
grace. Have you ever counted up the means of grace? 
How long is your list? What have you included? 
Public worship? Yes. Bible reading? Yes. Prayer? 
Yes. Is that all? Have you not put down the sun- 
set? That is a means of grace. By all means, put 
that down. It is a sacrament. It is the visible sign 
of jan invisible grace. It is a symbol for mediating 
God’s grace to your heart. Put it down in the list 
of the means of grace; include it, also, in your list of 
sacraments. 

Reckon it a page in your Bible. It is certainly a 
word of the Lord. It is not a word of man. Man 
cannot speak after that fashion. There are some 
things which God allows man to assist Him in mak- 
ing. If God wants a potato or a turnip, a cucumber 
or a squash, He allows man to help Him in produc- 
ing it. If God wants a flower-bed or a lawn He al- 
lows man to collaborate with Him. But there are 
some things in which man can have no part. When 
God makes a sunset He says to man: “ Now, please 
step aside; I want to do all this by Myself. You can- 
not in any way assist Me. This work is completely 
beyond you. I, alone, can produce a work like this.” 
A father allows his little boy to do many things. He 
lets him run on this errand and on that. Some things 
he and the boy work at together. But, finally, the 
father says: “ Now my boy, I must do this all by 
myself. All you can do is to sit down and watch 
how I do it.” God alone makes the sunset. He al- 
lows man to run on many an errand, He collaborates 
with him in many a task, but when evening comes the 
heavenly Father says: “‘ Now my child, sit down, and 
see how beautiful I can make a sunset!” 


58 NATURE SERMONS 


It is a means of grace, it is a holy sacrament, it is 
a page of the Bible, and yet many of you turn away 
from it. I know you are ready with excuses. You 
say you do not live in the right quarter of the town, 
or you live on the wrong side of the street, or you live 
in an unfortunate part of the house. If you lived any- 
where else than where you do live, you would look at 
the sunset every evening! And others of you tell me 
you cannot see the sunset because of your work. Your 
work is not over until after sunset, or you are on your 
way home at sunset—and who can see a sunset in the 
subway or in our narrow streets? Or you are a 
woman and you must prepare the dinner when the sun 
is going down, and if you neglected the dinner in order 
to see the sunset you would have more clouds in the 
house than there are in the western sky. I know your 
excuses. They are all plausible, but not one of them 
is sound. We are all experts in making excuses. 
Whenever God prepares a feast and asks us to partake 
of it, we all, with one consent, begin to make excuse. 
It is not because of where you live, or because of your 
work that you see so few sunsets. It is because you 
do not care for them. ‘They do not appeal to you. 
They do not increase the sum-total of your joy. You 
can get on well without them and so you do. But if 
you wanted to see them you would go out of your > 
way, you would plan, you would sacrifice to see them. 

The sun sets at different times in different seasons 
of the year. You are not always at work, not always 
in the subway, not always in the kitchen when the sun 
is going down. If you do not live in a home with a 
western outlook you could walk to Riverside Drive, or 
you could walk to the end of the street in which you 
are living, and stay there long enough to see the sun 


SUNSETS 59 


go down. And if you could not do that on any other 
evening of the week, you could do it on Sunday eve- 
ning. You could put down the sunset as one of the 
features of your Sunday worship. Or, if you could 
not do this on every Sunday evening, you could make 
it a habit to devote a half-hour every evening to sun- 
sets during your summer vacation. If you only wanted 
to see the sunset and believed that it had a blessing to 
impart, and that your life is impoverished because you 
see so few sunsets, you would make it possible to see 
more sunsets this year than you have ever seen be- 
fore. 

Let me suggest a few reasons why you ought to 
give more attention to the sunset: 

In the first place, it is a miracle. Many persons are 
much troubled by the miracles of the New Testament. 
They cannot believe them. In the first place they never 
saw them with their own eyes, and not having seen 
them, they cannot accept them, and, moreover, the idea 
of a miracle seems to clash with the scientific concep- 
tion of universal and unchangeable law. For these 
two reasons many men and women of culture and high 
intelligence are loath to give credence to the New 
Testament accounts of miraculous events. Let me 
suggest to all such persons that you close your New 
Testament for a season and look at a miracle per- 
formed before your eyes. The day of miracles is not 
passed. God will perform one for you if you will 
open your eyes and look. ‘The sunset is a miracle, ac- 
cording to the New Testament idea of a miracle. 

There are four words used in the New Testament 
for the extraordinary deeds of Jesus. The first is 
“wonder.” They were called wonders because they 
excited astonishment in the eyes of all beholders. Men 


60 NATURE SERMONS 


were amazed and dumbfounded by what they saw. 
Now if a miracle is a phenomenon which arouses 
amazement then the sunset is a miracle. It will surely 
stir up astonishment in any mind which dwells upon 
it, it will amaze anybody who picks it to pieces and 
finds out how it is made. It is a wonder! 

Another New ‘Testament word for miracle is 
“sign.” A miracle is an event which points to some- 
thing, it is a token of something, it is a symbol of 
something, it is a pledge of something, it is an indica- 
tion of thought and purpose. It points to something 
beyond itself. Certainly the sunset does that. It is a 
signboard painted on the flaming highway of the gor- 
geous west, pointing to God! 

A third word is “ power.” ‘The things which Jesus 
did are sometimes called “ powers,” that is, they are 
displays of power. ‘They give the impression of a 
power at work beyond the strength of man. ‘The sun- 
set fulfills this idea. The sunset is a power—a display 
of power, running beyond the reach of human faculty. 
No man can make the sunset, no set. of men can make 
it. Not all the men of all the earth, with all their 
talent and all their genius, and making use of all the 
apparatus and machinery which man’s ingénuity has 
been able to produce, can create the vast and dazzling 
splendour of a western sky. A sunset is a power. A 
display of force running beyond the energy of man- 
kind is a miracle. 

A fourth word is “ work.’ Sometimes the New 
Testament writers call the deeds of Jesus “signs,” 
sometimes “signs and wonders,” sometimes “ signs 
and worders and powers,” and sometimes they con- 
tent themselves with the word “ works.” A miracle 
is a work—a mighty work; and surely the sunset is a 


SUNSETS 61 


work—a mighty work. It is something achieved, done, 
brought to pass. A sunset, then, fulfills every condi- 
tion of a miracle which the New Testament lays down. 
Look, then, at this miracle which God Almighty per- 
forms every day before your eyes. It is not done con- 
trary to law. No law 1s broken by the formation of 
the clouds, by the colouring of them, by the movement 
of them. All the vibrations of the ether, the dancing 
of the dust-particles, the movements of the air- 
currents, take place according to law. God achieves 
the sunset through law. A miracle is not a violation 
of law. No law is said to have been suspended or 
broken by the men who wrote the New Testament. 
All the wonderful deeds of our Lord were done 
through law! 

The sunset is a parable. A parable is a verbal pic- 
ture used in order to set forth a spiritual truth. All 
our Lord’s parables are pictures. The Prodigal Son, 
The Good Samaritan, The Foolish Virgins, The 
Sower, Dives and Lazarus—what are they all but un- 
fading pictures, hung in the gallery of the mind, not 
to be taken down for ever? Our Lord loved to 
speak in parables, and on some days He spake in no 
other way. He loves to speak in parables now. One 
of His favourite parables is the sunset. It is a pic- 
ture, setting forth a spiritual truth. The fact which it 
proclaims is that God is a lover of beauty, God is 
fond of colour, God is an artist. There is no parable 
recorded in the New ‘Testament which makes that fact 
so vivid and impressive as the parable which God 
speaks daily in the sky of the west. 

The sunset is a medicine. Shakespeare says that 
sleep is a balm for hurt minds. So, also, is a sunset. 
It is soft and tender and beautiful, and that is what 


62 NATURE SERMONS 


we need at the end of the day. In the morning we 
are courageous and jubilant, but the cares of the day 
sap our vitality, and we often come to the evening hour 
with strength depleted and much of our vim and zest 
gone. Life which was spangled in the morning be- 
comes in the late afternoon a dingy drab, and so God 
hangs up a beautiful picture to cheer our heart a bit. 
Just when the beauty is fading out of life, God gives 
this great splash of colour to create hope and joy 
again. When we begin to stagger under life’s routine 
and monotony, God sets the western sky on fire to 
make the world romantic again. 

The New Testament says that sometimes Jesus did 
His most wonderful cures at sunset. It was when the 
sun was hovering over the horizon, and the poetry of 
the dusk was stealing into the air, that the people 
carried out their sick ones and laid them at His feet. 
It was when the necromancy of the sunset was at its 
height, that streams of healing flowed from Him into 
the exhausted veins of men. Every evening He takes 
His place on His throne in the west, and e’er the sun 
goes down we should bring out our weakened faith 
and shadowed hopes and wounded affections, and lay 
them at His feet, allowing the glory of the sinking 
sun to shine around about them, and give us health 
and strength again. : 

The sunset is a mystery. Did you ever hear a 
scientist talk about the mechanism of a sunset? You 
can read all that up some time for yourselves. My 
sermons are not scientific lectures. They are not 
scientific expositions, but sermons, their inner purpose 
being the purpose of all true sermons—the moving of 
the soul toward God. But if you should hear a 
physicist talk to you about the sunset, he would sur- 


SUNSETS 63 


prise you by his declarations. He would tell you that 
the sunset is made of a few gases, a multitude of drops 
of vapour, millions of particles of dust, and a handful 
of sunbeams. He would go on to assure you that the 
gorgeousness of the sunset is due to atmospheric dust. 
The earth is tied up in a dust-bag. An ocean of dust 
flows round our planet several miles deep. The dust 
particles nearer the earth are large and coarse. But 
as you ascend they become smaller and smaller, until 
at last they become microscopic, and in the highest 
regions they are so small that no instrument can detect 
them. We know of their existence solely from the ef- 
fects they produce. If it were not for this dust, the 
sky would not be blue and the sun would not be golden. 
If it were not for the dust, the sunset would be shorn 
of its glory. 

Why is the sun more beautiful on the horizon than 
it is above our heads? It is because we see it through 
more air, and that means we see it through more dust; 
the more dust the greater scope for reflection and re- 
fraction, and the operations of all the other principles 
by which the potential glories of light are unfolded. 
The sunsets near great cities are usually red, and this 
is because of the dust. The red waves are longer and 
stronger than the yellow and orange rays, and much 
longer than the green and the blue, so that.it is often- 
times only the red waves which shoulder their way 
through the dust-ocean and succeed in reaching the 
eye. Why is yonder cloud so gloriously white? It 
is because of the dust-particles in it. They are re- 
flecting the light. Why are its edges gorgeously crim- 
son or purple? It is because of the dust particles 
which are refracting the light. 

What a mystery it is that a thing so resplendently 


64 NATURE SERMONS 


beautiful should be made of vibrations, and dust- 
particles and the movements of vapour. By reflec- 
tion and refraction, and radiation and absorption, 
every dust particle obeying one law, and every vibra- 
tion obeying another law, and every air-current obey- 
ing still another law, this stupendous miracle comes to 
pass. 

A sunset is a revelation of God. It reveals His in- 
finite resources. It lights up for us the idea of in- 
finity. A sunset is one of the most transitory of all 
creations. It is shorter lived than the flower of the 
field. In the morning the flower grows up—in the eve- 
ning it is cut down and withered. But a sunset grows 
up in the evening and is cut down in the evening. Its 
entire life covers but a few minutes. You have known 
a child to draw a picture on a slate, and rub it out, 
draw another and rub it out, draw still another and rub 
it out. But he soon gets tired and lays down his slate. 
God draws a sunset and rubs it out, draws another and 
rubs it out, another and another and another, and rubs 
them out. He has been doing this for thousands of 
years, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, mil- 
lions, ten of millions, possibly hundreds of millions of 
years, every evening of every week of every month 
of every year. For hundreds of millions of years a 
sunset, and no two sunsets alike, “since the morning 
stars sang together and the sons of God shouted for 
joy”! I have studied sunsets for many years, and I 
have never seen two alike. One summer I made a rec- 
ord, day after day, of the features of every sunset, and 
there was not a reproduction or a repetition in the 
entire series. In the sunset you are certain to get 
something new. A sunset is like a romance: you never 
know how it is coming out. You may have seen five 


SUNSETS 65 


hundred sunsets, and the way they concluded; but you 
cannot tell what God will do with the sun this evening. 

You get, also, in the sunset, a revelation of the 
character of God’s mind. It reveals to you His intel- 
ligence, the zesthetic element of His nature. You all, 
doubtless, have experimented with oil paintings of the 
impressionist school. You have gone up close to the 
painting, and held your eye only four or five inches 
away. What a daub it was! No proportion, no per- 
spective, no beauty, no trace of mind, no hint of intelli- 
gence, no indication of a lofty end, nothing but gobs of 
paint. It seemed as though some boys might have 
smeared the pigments on the canvas in fun, or as 
though a dog with his tail drenched in paint might have 
produced just such effects by wagging his tail against 
the canvas, or as though the wind, saturated with colour 
might, in blowing over the canvas, have deposited these 
blotches and scabs. Certainly it gives no evidence of an 
intelligent and rational soul. But now stand back—a 
little farther—still farther. Ah, now! You are at the 
right focal distance, and you see that it is a painting, it 
is a picture, it is a landscape—a glorious landscape. 
There is proportion, perspective, outline in it; there are 
delicate shadings, exquisite gradations in it; and as you 
look upon the beautiful creation, you feel you stand 
face to face with the artist’s soul. Only intelligence, 
skill, and a soul in love with beauty, could ever have 
created a work like that. 

Stand near to a sunset and what do you see? Ex- 
amine it through the microscope of science and what 
have you? Vibrations, dust, aqueous vapour, air-cur- 
rents. That is all. It seems as though these things 
might have been swept together by the wind, as though 
it all might be due to a fortuitous concourse of atoms, 


66 NATURE, SERMONS 


as though bits of matter might have fallen into a 
meaningless hodgepodge. But wait! Stand back! 
Farther back! Now look at it! A picture! Outlines 
such as no artist ever sketched—cathedrals, minarets, 
spires, ancient castles, majestic palaces, towers, domes, 
more majestic than those of which any architect ever 
dreamed. And colours—oh, what colours! Delicate 
tints, exquisite hues, artistic shadings, bewitching 
gradations, combinations of lights and shadows such 
as never entered into the heart of man to conceive. 
Ah, this is none other than the work of God—the work 
of the Infinite Artist. If Moses took off his sandals 
in the presence of a burning bush, well may we bow 
our heads and hearts in the presence of a sky all aflame 
with God! 

Our generation needs the sunset. We need the re- 
fining influence of its quiet, unsurpassable beauty. We 
are growing coarse, civilization is brutalizing the heart. 
We love the blaze and bang of things. “ Let us have 
a good time,” says one man to another. “ What shall 
we do?” “Let us go to Coney Island.” That would 
be the answer given by tens of thousands of people 
in New York. A good time is time spent amid a lot 
of cheap attractions, the glare of lights, the blare of 
noise, enjoying things which are of the earth earthy. 
“Let us have a good time!” ‘ What shall we do?” 
“Let us go to a big hotel, and have a fine dinner, | 
where the music is like the music at a circus, and where 
women dance all the time you eat.” The heart is be- 
coming benumbed by the deadening influences of 
modern life. How few people there are who can have 
a good time by themselves: who can sit enraptured in 
the presence of the ineffable tenderness and ethereal 
loveliness of the sky! 


SUNSETS 67, 
We need the sunset for consolation. We need to 
be comforted. In his famous hymn, Reginald Heber 
speaks of a country in which “ every prospect pleases 
and only man is vile.” Yes, Nature is everywhere and 
always beautiful. Look over a landscape from any 
hilltop. Beautiful! Stand on the prairie and look 
toward the horizon. Beautiful! The mountains are 
beautiful and so are the hills. ‘The rivers are beauti- 
ful and so are the lakes. ‘The ocean is beautiful; there 
is one beauty in the silence of the central sea, and 
there is another beauty near the shore where the tide 
beats itself into spray on the rocks, and the spray 
catches the sunbeams and holds them as if loath to 
let them go. Look into the heavens at morning, at 
noon, and at evening—nothing but beauty the whole 
day long! Look again at night. The beauty has 
changed only in this—that it has been raised to a 
higher power. ‘‘ Every prospect pleases.” Every view 
delights the eye. Every look rejoices the heart. 
“Only man is vile.” It is man who breaks down 
our faith, darkens our hope, tramples the life out of 
our love. It is man who makes us doubt the goodness 
of God. It would be easy to believe in God if it were 
not for men. | 
Let us, then, spend more time with Nature. The 
trouble with us is that we spend too much time with 
men. We get the daily paper between us and: the 
setting sun. Every evening the streets are filled with 
newsboys. Everybody wants the last edition. We 
read it at sunset. Go into the elevated trains—every- 
body is reading the evening edition. Go into the sub- 
way—everybody reading. Nobody thinking of the 
sunset, nobody thinking of God, and so we get feverish 
and despondent and our hearts are filled with bitter 


68 NATURE SERMONS 


feelings, all because we think too much about men. 
Let us get God’s evening edition. He publishes an 
extra every hour of the day, but the evening edition 
is the best of all. It is the one which He prints in 
purple and gold. In this one He gives us fresh as- 
surances of His love. It would be well for all of us 
if we read the newspapers less, and paid more atten- 
tion to God’s last edition which He flings down to us 
every evening from the printing presses of the sky. 
Let us, then, come back to the idea with which we 
started. The sunset is a word of God. He gives 
some things to our mouth, other things He gives to our 
ears, other things He gives to our eyes. He gives 
music to our ears. Music is one of the languages of 
the heart. You cannot remain in a room in which 
music is being played without your mood being 
affected. You may be reading, or working, or listen- 
ing to a conversation, but underneath it all that music 
will be speaking to your heart, and the currents of 
your emotional life will be changed. Colour is an- 
other language of the heart. Just as music reaches the 
heart through the ear so does colour reach the heart 
through the eye. It changes one’s mood. We cannot 
remain unaltered in the presence of colour. Beauty 
does not allow us to remain what we were. God, 
through the colours of the western sky will bring us, 
if we let Him, into the tranquillity and sweetness of 
a Christlike mood. Man cannot live by bread alone, 
but by every word which proceedeth from the mouth 
of God, and one of His great words is the sunset. 
“The heavens declare the glory of God: and the 
firmament sheweth his handywork. Day unto day 
uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowl- 
edge. There is no speech nor language where 


SUNSETS 69 


their voice is not heard. Their line is gone out 
through all the earth, and their words to the end of 
the world. In them hath he set a tabernacle for the 
sun.” 


“ Day is dying in the west; 
Heaven is touching earth with rest ; 
Wat and worship while the night 
Sets her evening lamps alight 
Through all the sky.” 


“ Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of hosts! 
Heaven and earth are full of Thee; 
Heaven and earth are praising Thee, 

O Lord Most High!” 


VI 
STORMS 


| HE subject of my sermon is storms. We do 
not know much about them from experience. 
We are living in a part of the world in which 
we have few storms. They come only occasionally, 
and when they do come they are, as a rule, quite 
small. Even the most furious of them are nothing 
compared with the mighty storms which visit many 
sections of our planet. If we have a storm of un- 
usual violence we talk about it for twenty or thirty 
years. But while our storms are infrequent and also 
diminutive, we do not like them. Many of us are 
offended by them. We say: “I do hope it won’t 
storm.” After a little squall has passed we say: 
“What a terrible storm!” We put down a storm as 
an intruder, an interloper, a disturber of our peace, 
an upsetter of our plans. We class it among our 
enemies. We group it with the snakes, the brambles; 
the briars, and other things that torment us and make 
us afraid. It is because we do not like storms and 
have paid so little attention to them, that it may be 
profitable for us to think about them in the house of 
God. 

What is a storm? If you asked me to suggest a 
definition it would be this: an extensive and violent 
disturbance of the air. Not every disturbance is a 
storm. Limited disturbance or a gentle disturbance 
would not be a storm, but a breeze. It might be a 
draught, or a zephyr. A disturbance must be both 
Preached, May 28, 1916. 


7O 


STORMS 71 


extensive and violent in order to create what people 
cal! a storm. A storm is always made of agitated air. 
It may put on different suits of clothing, but when 
you strip it, you will find nothing but air in a state 
of disturbance. It does not matter what clothing the 
storm puts on (and it will put on anything upon 
which it can lay its hands). If rain-drops are 
abundant, then it clothes itself in rain, and we call it 
a rain-storm. If there are snowflakes at hand, then 
it wraps itself in snow, and we call it a snow-storm. 
If there are grains of sand present, then it dresses it- 
self up in sand, and we call it a sand-storm. If there 
is a great deal of electricity present then it wraps itself 
in thunder and lightning, and we call it a thunder- 
storm. When a storm moves out from the land upon 
the sea, it will, in certain cases, tear a strip off the 
ocean, and wrap that strip of the ocean around it, in 
which case we call it a waterspout. But, in every 
case, the storm is really agitated air. 

Storms are among God’s earliest creations. There 
were storms long before men existed on the planet. 
They are older than the animals, the birds and the 
fish, they are older than the grass and the trees. Ever 
since man has been on the planet he has had to live 
with them, and from the beginning he has been more 
or less afraid of them. One of the reasons why man, 
for so many centuries, dreaded the sea was because, the 
sea was the home of fierce storms. He did not ven- 
ture very far from the shore because of his dread of 
meeting a storm. From the beginning man has been 
awed by them, and the most sensitive men have been 
most profoundly impressed by them. But there have 
always been men who have delighted in storms. They 
have felt in the midst of the storm a thrill which came 


72 NATURE SERMONS 


to them at no other time. The poets from the be- 
ginning have taken pleasure in describing the phenom- 
ena of the storm. Some of you remember the storm 
in The Iliad of Homer. Some of you have not for- 
gotten the description which Virgil gives us in the 
first book of The Aineid: | 


“ South, East and West with mixed confusion roar, 

And roll the foaming billows to the shore. 

The cables crack; the sailors’ fearful cries 
Ascend; and sable night involves the skies; 

And heaven itself is ravished from their eyes. 
Loud peals of thunder from the poles ensue, 
Then fiashing fires the transient light renew: 
The face of things a frightful image bears, 

And present death in various forms appears.” 


Shakespeare, again and again, makes use of storms. 
I would suggest to the young people a very pleasant 
way of spending a part of their vacation: Turn over 
the pages of Shakespeare and see how the storms move 
through his dramas. Read Julius Cesar, and see how 
the poet prepares for the climax of the great tragedy 
by telling you all about “a tempest dropping fire.” 
Read Macbeth and see how wild the night was when 
Duncan was slain. The greatest of all Shakespeare’s 
storms is the storm in the midst of which poor, old 
King Lear pours out the agony of his broken heart. 
There is nothing sublimer or more awe-inspiring in all 
Shakespeare’s tragedies than the picture of King Lear 
in the midst of a storm. The storm of the human 
heart is there projected against a storm of the air. 
Byron was great in his description of storms. Read 
his Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage again, and see how 
skillfully he can manage the lightning and thunder. 
The Hebrew poets also tried their hand. If you want 


STORMS 73 


a graphic description of a thunderstorm read the eight- 
eenth Psalm. ‘The Hebrew heart was very sensitive 
to the majesty of storms. They looked upon the winds 
as servants of the Almighty. One of the great decla- 
rations of Hebrew poetry is: “‘ He makes messengers 
out of the winds,” and in the one hundred and forty- 
eighth Psalm when the poet is calling on the different 
parts of creation to come to church and worship the 
Eternal, he calls upon the fire and the hail, the sun 
and the vapour, and then he calls for the stormy wind 
fulfilling God’s word. “ Come,” he says, ““O stormy 
winds, and praise the name of the Lord.” 

The wind has always been a symbol of mystery. 
Our Lord talking to Nicodemus, uses the wind in that 
way: “ You hear the sound of it,’ He said, “ but you 
do not know where it comes from, and you do not 
know where it is going.” Equally mysterious is this 
spiritual experience which the soul of man must pass 
through. It is a remarkable fact that it was not until 
the beginning of the nineteenth century that men began 
to study storms scientifically. Up to that time they 
had known about them externally, they had been in- 
spired by them or frightened by them, but it never 
apparently occurred to anybody that it was possible to 
understand a storm. ‘The first scientific book ever 
printed upon winds was published in the year 1801, 
the first year of the nineteenth century. But 
from that day to this the study has been carried on 
with increasing vigour and enthusiasm, so that mete- 
orology has become one of the most fascinating of 
all studies, and there are thousands of observers 
scattered over the earth that are making a special 
study of storms. Men of science have now taken the 
storm into the laboratory, they have put it on the 


[ 


74 NATURE SERMONS 


dissecting table, they have thrown it into the crucible, 
they are finding what it is made of, and how it is 
possible for us to adjust our lives to it. 

The whole story of the investigation reads like 
romance. We now know where storms are born. 
There are various cradles scattered over the ¢arth. 
One of them, for instance, is the region west of 
the Mississippi, another is the Gulf of St. Law- 
rence, another is a little south of Ireland, another is 
in the Philippines and out of these cradles one storm 
after another proceeds. Science tells us that there 
is a large variety of storms. ‘The variety is indicated 
by the number of names that we use. We speak of 
the tempest, the hurricane, the cyclone, the whirlwind, 
the tornado, the typhoon. Every storm has its own 
behaviour, and that behaviour is carefully noted. 
Some storms are regular, and come at regular periods, 
and others are irregular. Some storms move north- 
east and others move southeast. Many storms move 
along certain tracks just as express trains do. You 
can tell in advance where a storm of a certain type is 
coming out. But there are other storms which are 
capricious. ‘They move in one direction a certain dis- 
tance, then change the direction. They move with a 
certain speed up to a certain point, and then their 
speed is accelerated or it is retarded. ‘They often play 
jokes upon the weather-bureau man. He announces, 
with all gravity, that a storm is going to appear on a 
certain day. It does not arrive because the storm ap- 
parently changed its mind and turned either to the 
north or the south. ‘The weather-bureau man says it 
will arrive at a certain hour, but for some inexplicable 
reason the storm hastens its speed and arrives six 
hours ahead of time, or it seems to grow weary and 


STORMS 75 


lags behind, arriving several hours late. A storm seems 
to have as many dispositions and tempers as human 
beings have. It is hard to predict anything about 
some of them. 

The causes of storms have been the subject of pro- 
longed investigation. We are living, as you know, at 
the bottom of a great ocean of air, which is never in 
a state of equilibrium. Upon this air-ocean the sun 
is always throwing down great quantities of heat. 
This heat throws the ocean out of equilibrium. Some 
parts of the air become heated and rise. When they 
rise they flow toward the north. This leaves a vacuum 
in the south. Great currents of air proceed to fill up 
that vacuum so that the lower strata of air flow south- 
ward and the upper strata of air flow northward. 
All the winds would blow north and south were it 
not for the rotation of the earth. This deflects the 
course of the storms, and in one hemisphere they move 
to the northeast and in the other hemisphere they move 
to the southeast, all because the earth moves more 
rapidly at the equator than anywhere else. So that 
if you want to account for the behaviour of the storm 
you must take into consideration, not only the heat, 
but the rotation of the earth, and not only this but 
the forces of gravity and the forces of magnetic in- 
duction, and you must take into account numberless 
electrical attractions and repulsions. 

Thus every storm is the resultant of a great many 
different forces that contribute to make it what it is. 
But the most wonderful thing that science has dis- 
covered about storms is that they are all obedient to 
law. It was once supposed that comets were lawless 
—that they whisked their tails in our faces whenever 
they chose, but the astronomer has discovered that 


76 NATURE SERMONS 


every comet is as subservient to law as the sun itself. 
It was once supposed that storms were utterly reck- 
less, tearing frantically across the face of the earth, 
amenable to no sovereignty whatsoever. But it is a 
demonstrated fact that no storm ever breaks the law. 
Every storm is what it is and moves where it does, in 
absolute obedience to law. And when I sit down with 
these books that tell us about all this—about the mag- 
netic induction and the electric attractions and re- 
pulsions—and when I look at the diagrams that set 
forth the nature of storms, and when I consider the 
marvellous way in which they are generated and in 
which they move, I cry out in the language of Paul: 
““O the depths of the riches both of the wisdom and 
the knowledge of God! how unsearchable are his 
judgments and his ways past finding out! 

For of him, and through him, and to him, are all 
things: to whom be glory for ever.” 

A. storm is the clearest of all the revelations we 
have of God’s power. Nowhere else in the universe 
do we get so impressively the idea of limitless power 
as we get it in the storm. ‘The stars do not impress 
us with God’s power; they are quiet, scintillating points 
of light projected on the softest of blue backgrounds. 
When we stop to meditate about the size of them, we 
arrive at the idea of power, but the stars themselves do — 
not make us sensible of power. Nor do the moun- 
tains: they are quiet, sleepy masses of granite basking 
in the sun. If we meditate upon the way in which 
they come up, we arrive at the idea of power, but the 
mountains, themselves, do not indicate to the mind the 
idea of power. Nor does the ocean—in its quiet 
moods. It is beautiful, even sublime, because of its 
size and its depth; but it is only when the wind 


STORMS 77 


tramples on it and makes it mad that the ocean gives 
us the idea of power. 

The only phenomenon in the world of Nature, other 
than wind, which gives us the conception of power is 
the cataract. Water leaping from lofty altitudes has 
a wonderful capacity for impressing and awing the 
heart. Some of you know what the heart feels when 
you stand either above or below Niagara, and some of 
you know how wild and terrific is the leap of the 
Yellowstone River in the canyon that bears its name. 
But even in the presence of the greatest cataracts, the 
idea of power is not driven so far into the soul as it 
is by a storm. When you see great masses of water 
falling, there is a regularity about it all, and you feel 
that the strength is measurable, that the power can be 
computed. But when a storm tears across the earth 
you are face to face with power that cannot be com- 
puted and that it is impossible to curb or restrain. 
When the wind rushes at the rate of two hundred 
miles an hour it strikes a feeling through the heart 
different from that which any cataract, however great, 
can inspire. And when the wind raises its speed to 
three hundred or four hundred or five hundred miles 
an hour, sweeping everything before it, we gaze upon 
the mightiest manifestation of power ‘presented any 
where in the heavens or on the earth. 

There is nothing that the wind cannot do. The 
proudest edifices erected by man are only cardboards 
to it. It can pick suspension bridges from their piers 
and toss them aside as though they were so many 
straws. It can tear up trees by the roots or twist 
them off many feet above the ground. There are few 
sounds so piercing as the shriek which an oak gives 
when the storm twists it to death. Anybody who has 


78 NATURE SERMONS 


ever heard an oak die in a storm, has taken into his 
soul an experience which can never be obliterated. 
There is a strikingly significant sentence in one of the 
Psalms: “ He breaketh in pieces the cedars of Leb- 
anon.” ‘The Hebrew poet was impressed by many 
wonderful things that the Almighty could do, but he 
could conceive of nothing more amazing than this— 
His power to break into pieces the cedars of Leb- 
anon. 

It is in the midst of the storm, therefore, that man 
learns anew his absolute helplessness. When the sun 
is shining, man sometimes begins to strut and thinks 
himself a wonderful being, or vaunts himself upon the 
solidity of the things which he can create; then a storm 
comes and lays flat his proudest buildings and tears 
to pieces the most solid of his creations and blows 
away, as if they were only so much thistledown, the 
heaviest of his possessions. ‘The wind is a great re- 
vealer of God’s power. 

The storm also presents a great problem to faith. 
Storms are destructive, both of property and of life. 
Storms have no pity, no mercy. Ever since the Great 
War began many of us have been sorely distressed 
because of the cruelty of the methods of warfare 
pursued. The practice of drowning men, women and. 
children in the ocean who were not combatants at all, 
and were entirely innocent, and who had done nothing 
whatever to deserve their fate—that has struck con- 
sternation and agony through the heart of mankind. 
But to the thoughtful mind that kind of a problem 
is always on hand; that sort of a tragedy has been 
perpetuated through all the centuries of human his- 
tory. The winds are God’s messengers, says the 
Psalmist. Well, if they are they do amazing things! 


STORMS 79 


They make no distinction: they sweep into eternity 
men, women and children, the innocent along with the 
guilty. They have sent to the bottom of the sea 
thousands of men and hundreds of billions of dollars’ 
worth of property. They have swept across the land 
and crushed to death human beings by the tens of 
thousands. They have destroyed man’s crops, blown 
his home into fragments, killed his wife and his chil- 
dren. You would suppose that the winds were mes- 
sengers of a fiend. 

If you want to read some of the most appalling 
pages in the history of the world, then read the his- 
tory of a dozen of the world’s great storms. Read 
the account, some time, of the two great storms in the 
month of August in 1780 that swept over the West 
Indies, two of the most frightful visitations that this 
earth has ever known. Scores killed in one place, two 
hundred, three hundred, six hundred in another, in 
one place fourteen hundred invalids and wounded 
persons crushed to death. Thousands of buildings 
levelled to the earth, the labour of generations 
wiped completely out. Or, read about that terrific 
storm of October 31, 1876, which sent a tidal 
wave from ten to forty-five feet deep into the mouth 
of the Ganges, drowning a hundred thousand human 
beings. Or, read the account of the great tornado that 
tore its way through the City of St. Louis, May 27, 
1896, destroying thirteen million dollars’ worth of 
property ina few minutes. Many of us still remember 
distinctly the consternation in the national heart 
caused by the terrific storm which overwhelmed Gal- 
veston in 1900. There had been many a storm that 
had crossed the Gulf of Mexico but never a storm 
just like that one. For some unaccountable reason that 


80 NATURE SERMONS 


storm made at once for the City of Galveston, and its 
people were helpless in its awful embrace. 

Is it true that God makes His winds messengers? 
What are we to say about these storms? Certainly 
man has nothing to do with them. Man is responsible 
for much, but he is not responsible for storms. If 
there be any God at all, they would seem to be His. 
He must be responsible for their conduct, He must 
be held accountable for what they do. And what have 
they done? They have worked devastation and ruin 
for thousands of years. It is hard to understand why 
God should permit thousands of tons of food to go 
to the bottom of the Atlantic when so many of His 
children are starving on land. That is a problem that 
storms present—why should God permit His mes- 
sengers to send incalculable treasures to the bottom of 
the sea when men are so poor on the land? 

It is only when we sit down with a problem like 
this that we begin to understand the need and the 
value of faith. The Bible is all the time reminding 
us that we must walk by faith and not by sight. We 
do not always understand just what that means. A 
storm helps us to understand it. Is there a God who 
created the universe and who rules it? ‘There is evi- 
dence that there is, and there is also evidence there is 
not. Does He take interest in man, or is. He abso- 
lutely indifferent? ‘There is evidence that He is 
interested, there is also evidence that He is not. 
Is He a good God, or is He a malicious God? Does 
He take delight in blessing men, or does He take 
delight in torturing them and killing them? There is 
evidence that He is good, there is also evidence that 
He is a demon. The way is open, and you must 
choose. 


STORMS 81 


In mathematics, we are coerced to a conclusion. 
If you put two and two together, you have four. You 
cannot have any other result. If you throw a:stone 
into the air it falls—you are compelled to admit it. 
If you put your hand in the fire it burns, there is no 
denying it. But in the realm of religious truth it is 
always possible for you to deny. You must walk by 
faith, it is impossible to walk by sight. The existence 
of storms makes this abundantly clear. The poet says 
in one of our hymns: 


“ Dark is His path on the wings of the storm.” 


Yes, His path is indeed dark and nowhere is it so 
dark as on the wings of the storm, If we listen to 
the storm we must walk by faith and not expect to walk 
by sight. : 

This shows us why it was necessary that Jesus 
should come. Nature is not sufficient to show us 
God’s heart. For reasons which we do not under- 
stand, the operations of Nature are such that the Eter- 
nal Pity cannot be clearly revealed through them. We 
need a more complete revelation—-we need Jesus 
Christ. Before He comes, the scales are almost evenly 
balanced. There are reasons for believing and there 
are reasons for doubting. He comes, and He inclines 
the scales toward God. He comes up out of this uni- 
verse of mystery and darkness, and is so beautiful 
and gentle and loving and sweet, that in spite of the 
storms we feel ourselves justified in believing in the 
goodness of God. 

What, then, is the supreme lesson which we are to 
get from the heart of the storm? It is the old, old 
lesson which Job received centuries ago. You will re- 


82 NATURE SERMONS 


member that at the end of that wonderful poem we 
are told that God spoke to Job at last out of the whirl- 
wind, and this is what He said: “ Look at the mys- 
teries of the natural world. Can you understand this? 
Can you understand that? Can you understand this 
other? Of course not. Well, if you cannot under- 
stand the mysteries of the physical creation, why 
should you be surprised that you cannot understand 
the mysteries of the spiritual universe?” It was in 
the cyclone, in the power of it and the behaviour of 
it that Job found the mysteriousness of the universe 
reaching its climax, and when he thought about his 
absolute incompetency to deal with the mysteries 
around him, he said: “I have been talking about 
things which are too wonderful for me, I have been 
trying to explain things which I cannot understand. 
I have got a new revelation of God. I had heard of 
Him by the hearing of the ear, but now I have a new 
revelation of Him, and therefore I abhor myself and 
repent in dust and ashes.” 


Vil 
SHADOWS 


N this sermon I want to think with you about 

| shadows. I like to take something that is familiar 

and common, something which you have at your 

door and which it is not necessary for you to travel 
half-way round the world to find. 

Shadows are the most ethereal and insubstantial of 
all the phenomena we have thus far studied. ‘There is 
nothing so light and so thin and so bodiless as a 
shadow. You cannot pick one up with the fingers of 
your hand. If you pick it up at all, it must be with 
the fingers of your mind. A shadow weighs nothing. 
You throw it on the scales, but you cannot weigh it— 
it has no weight. I have often wondered what a kitten 
thinks when, for the first time, it pounces down upon 
a shadow thinking that it is going to catch something, 
and suddenly discovers that there is something in this 
world into which a kitten cannot get its claws! 

And so a shadow has become a metaphor, and has 
a fixed place in our English speech. We have many 
words expressive of that which is infinitesimally small, 
but when we push language to the limit, we use the 
word shadow. A mother says to her little boy: “ You 
had not a shadow of an excuse for doing that.” She 
might have said: “‘ You had not an atom of an excuse, 
or a splinter, or an iota, or a scintilla, or a trace of an 
excuse.” But if the mother wishes to say the strongest 
thing that it is possible to say, she uses the word 
“ shadow.” When we have not the shadow of an 


Preached, May 27, 1917. 
83 


84. NATURE SERMONS 


excuse we have no excuse at all. When you push 
human thought to the vanishing point, then you fall 
back on the word “ shadow.” 

Not only is a shadow ethereal and insubstantial, but 
it ts also evanescent. It is constantly changing. It 
lives for a little time and then passes away. You look 
at it and turn your head away, in a moment you look 
at it again, and it is changed; it is longer or shorter, 
it is thicker or more slender. A shadow cannot pos- 
sibly remain an hour the same. A shadow 1s as 
changeable and as fidgety as a little child. You look 
at a shadow and go away for a season, and when you 
come back it is gone. That shadow will not come back 
again. It has gone for ever. A shadow is not only 
empty but it is also fleeting. Shakespeare understood 
the weight and worth of English words as probably 
no other man has ever understood them. When he 
uses a word for the expression of a certain thought 
we may be sure that it is the best word that can be 
chosen. ‘There is a fine and faultless fidelity in his 
choice of words. When it dawns upon Macbeth that 
life is empty and also transitory, what is the first word 
which Shakespeare puts into his mouth? “ Life’s 
but a walking shadow.” ‘That tells the whole sad 
story. Shakespeare goes on according to his fashion | 
piling word on word in order to deepen the impression, 
but when he comes to the end of the sentence he can 
say only this: “signifying nothing.” All had been 
told in the word with which he started. 

Now shadows are the children of God. They are 
His creation, they are foreordained by Him. You 
cannot conceive of a universe like this without shadows 
in it. There cannot be a universe with the sun and 
moon and stars, and the planet revolving on its axis, 


SHADOWS 85 


and moving beings on the surface of the planet, with- 
out shadows. ‘The Eternal planned a universe with 
shadows init. He said: “ Let there be shadows,” and 
shadows there were. When He looked upon the com- 
pleted universe the writer of the first book of the Bible 
says: ‘God saw that it was good.” ‘This means that 
He saw that the shadows were good, they enhanced the 
beauty of it all. And all these shadows are obedient 
to God’s eternal law. There has never been a dis- 
obedient shadow since the world began. All of them 
have been obedient to the God who created them. 

I love to look through books which I have no time 
to read. Life is too short to read many books, but 
there are many books which are worth looking 
through. I am especially fond of books dealing with 
mathematics. I love to look at pages of formulas, 
great masses of stuff which I have not wit enough 
to understand. But simply looking at it does me good. 
It makes me feel proud to know that I belong to a 
race which is capable of doing such wondrous things. 
And one of the books through which I love to look 
is a book on shades and shadows. ‘That is the sort 
of book that an architect loves and an artist ponders. 
In these books I find that shadows can be computed. 
Under certain conditions shadows will be of a cer- 
tain length and a certain breadth and a certain colour. 
It is possible for the whole problem to be worked ‘out 
by applying the principles of geometry. Every 
shadow is cast according to law. If you could pick up 
a shadow from the street and carry it into a labora- 
tory, you would find that it would not vary a hair’s 
breadth from what it ought to be. 

In this respect, all shadows are alike. We talk a 
good deal, in these days, about internationalism. 


86 NATURE SERMONS 


There is an internationalism of shadows. All the 
shadows of the world constitute one great brother- 
hood. God has made of one all the shadows of the 
earth. The shadows in Asia are like the shadows in 
Africa, and like the shadows in Europe, and like the 
shadows of both the Americas, and like the shadows 
of Australia, and like the shadows of all the islands of 
the sea. All the shadows, in every land, are obedient 
to the same laws, and these laws are the laws of the 
Eternal. 

Here is a wonderfully interesting fact if you stop 
to ponder it—that in all the thousands of shadows that 
play in our New York streets, not one of them is 
disobedient to the law of God. These shadows are 
children of the Most High. They play every day in 
our crowded streets. The automobiles run over them, 
but they do not cry. ‘They are as deathless as the 
Eternal, and every one is absolutely obedient to the 
regulations of the King of heaven. Look down Fifth 
Avenue, some day, at the proper time, and notice the 
thousands of shadows. Every lamp-post, every pole, 
every house, every policeman, every moving pedes- 
trian, every carriage, every automobile, every horse, 
casts a shadow. What a wonderful thing that law is 
over all! The rainbow is according to law, and so is 
the Milky Way, and so is the shadow of the little girl 
playing on Fifth Avenue. 

I was riding down one of our avenues the other 
afternoon with a friend, in his automobile, and [| 
suspect that he did not notice a single one of the 
many shadows over which he passed. I was looking 
at them all the way. I noticed them because this ser- 
mon was in my mind, and the sermon in my mind 
made my eye keen to observe shadows. ‘That is one 


SHADOWS 87 


of the purposes of a Nature sermon: it makes one’s 
eyes keen to things that would otherwise pass un- 
noticed. All this summer through, not a person 
reading this sermon will fail to notice more than once 
the play and beauty of the shadows. A Nature 
sermon adds a province to the great kingdom of our 
observation. 

Since shadows, then, are the children of the Most 
High God, they are also His obedient servants. They 
fulfill His will, they do the thing for which they have 
been created. I have been looking through The Psalm 
Book during the last week, and I am convinced that it 
is defective. The Psalm Book has no proper appre- 
ciation of the ministry of shadows. The Hebrew poets 
are very sensitive to the beauty of many of the forces 
of Nature, and when they call upon the universe to 
worship God they name thunder and lightning and hail 
and sleet, snow, stormy wind, hills and mountains, 
trees and seas, sun and moon and stars, but there is 
no Hebrew poet so far as I can now remember who 
ever called upon the shadows to come into the Temple 
and lift voices of praise to the King of heaven. The 
Hebrew poet was impressed by the fact that the winds 
could be God’s messengers, but he did not reach the 
point at which it was possible for him to see that the 
Divine Will can also be fulfilled by shadows. It will 
be worth our while to think of at least three of the 
ways in which shadows fulfill the will of God. 

In the first place they enhance the beauty of the 
world. What would a picture be without shadows? 
Take the shadows out of any picture, and the picture 
is for ever spoiled. ‘Take the shadows out of a land- 
scape and it is flat and insipid. Why is it that noon is 
the least interesting of any portion of the day? Prose 


88 NATURE SERMONS / 


writers may talk of noon, but poets hardly ever/do. 
There is nothing poetic in the noon. The poets sing 
of the morning and the evening, and the reason they 
sing of. morning and evening is because the mornings 
and evenings are beautiful; and the reason mornings 
and evenings are beautiful is because mornings and 
evenings are the times of shadows. The day grows 
increasingly beautiful as it approaches its end. Life 
becomes increasingly rich as it draws to its close, and 
it is largely because the shadows are lengthening. As 
night comes on, the shadows become richer and more 
purple, and something passes into our soul which the 
noon cannot give. It is in the evening hours, before 
night comes, that the heart becomes more mellow and 
tender, and the angels of our better nature come out 
and sing. 

Who does not love the twilight? Who does not love 
the deepening dusk? We speak sometimes of the 
gloaming. We love the gloaming because of the rich- 
ness of the shadows. I have many times gone to Bos- 
ton from New York on a morning train, and the jour- 
ney is an interesting one because it carries one through 
the middle of the day. I am always impressed by the 
beauty of the country. But when I start for Boston 
at four or five in the afternoon of some lovely day 
in June, the whole country looks like fairyland because 
of the play of the shadows. There are shadows lying 
across all the streams, there are shadows on the surface 
of all the lakes. Every little pond throws a picture 
into your eye as you pass. The only perfect time to 
travel is during the hours immediately before the night 
falls. When the shadows are all around you, you feel 
that you are in a land of enchantment. 

I had a friend, once, who was very sensitive to 


SHADOWS 89 


beauty. He was one of the most delicately organized 
men that it has ever been my fortune to meet. Like 
many another high-strung man it was difficult some- 
times for him to sleep, and so in order to quiet him- 
self it was his custom to walk up and down the avenue 
on which he lived, lined with great trees, and to study 
the shadows on the pavement. The moon has a won- 
derful fashion of turning pavements into silver and of 
using leaves as so many patterns with which to em- 
broider beautiful figures on the silver. And my friend 
would walk up and down that avenue by the hour, 
feasting his soul on the beauty of the shadows in the 
street. And when he used to talk to me about this 
feast of beauty I felt ashamed, for I had walked that 
same avenue many times and had never noticed a soli- 
tary shadow. In the presence of a man like that I 
felt as much beneath him as I feel that my dog is be- 
neath me. If it had not been for that man, the chances 
are I should never have preached this sermon on 
shadows. 

But shadows do more than simply minister to the 
esthetic part of our nature. They are genuinely use- 
ful. Long before man had mechanical ingenuity 
enough to fashion a clock or a watch, somebody had 
wit enough to make use of a shadow by means of 
which to tell the time of day. Nobody knows when 
the sundial was invented, but we can trace it back 
through many centuries. Before the days of clocks 
and watches men could tell how the hours were going 
simply by watching the passing of the shadow round 
the dial. It is said that even to the present time, 
travellers in the Arabian desert who are not the owners 
of watches, find out what time of day it is by the length 
of the shadow they cast upon the sand. It is neces- 


90 NATURE SERMONS 


sary for the pious Mohammedan to pray at certain 
times each day, and instead of consulting a watch he 
stands up against the sun and by the length of the 
shadow which he casts upon the sand he fae out 
when the time of prayer has come. © 

One of the most useful of all the shadows is the 
shadow of the moon. When the shadow of the moon 
falls upon the earth we call it an eclipse. There was 
a time when an eclipse of the sun was one of the 
most terrifying of all phenomena. Men cried out in 
consternation when it came. ‘They were in an agony 
while it lasted. Not understanding the cause of it 
they assumed it must be the creation of some deity 
who was angry, so they quaked and shuddered as long 
as the shadow lay across the land. But by and by, 
the astronomers discovered the cause of the eclipse, 
and now it is counted one of the greatest blessings of 
which astronomers know. The eclipse of the sun is 
looked forward to with happy anticipation, and prepa- 
rations are made months in advance in order to get the 
full advantage of it. Men are willing to travel half- 
way round the earth in order to get into advantageous 
positions so as to study the sun and the moon when 
the shadow falls. Many things about the sun we have 
learned because of this shadow, and many things about _ 
the moon, and also many things about the earth, which 
would have remained unknown probably for ever, if 
God had not ordained that now and then the moon’s 
shadow should fall upon the earth. And so you might 
say that an eclipse is a great black bag full of secrets. 
Science has untied the string by which the mouth of 
the bag was closed, and has poured out the secrets be- 
fore our eyes, so that we now know things about the 
sun and earth and moon of which the ancients never 


SHADOWS “OL 


dreamed. All this knowledge came to us through a 
shadow. 

Shadows are also fountains of refreshment. When 
man is hot and weary, he can cool his fevered brow 
by bathing in a shadow. Probably the greatest orator 
Israel ever produced was Isaiah. His literary style is 
stiff as cloth of gold; he is full of wondrous images, 
but not one of his images is more beautiful than this: 
“As the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.” He 
is describing the Messiah, the long-looked-for man 
who is to bring rélief to the weary world. In the 
Orient, they appreciate shadows as we do not do here. 
In Palestine, the sky is often without a cloud, and the 
sun beats down with pitiless intensity. In many parts 
of the land there are no trees and therefore no shelter 
from the sun at noon. In those regions the only shelter 
obtainable is that from a great boulder in the field. 
The weary traveller who has trudged along the dusty 
road, hour after hour, sees the boulder in the distance, 
and the very sight of it brings new courage to his 
heart. When at last he arrives at it, he throws him- 
self down in its refreshing shadow, and out of that 
shadow receives strength sufficient to carry him to his 
journey’s end. That is the picture that was in Isaiah’s 
mind when looking down the years he saw the Mes- 
siah. He was to be like “ the shadow of a great rock 
in a weary land.” 

Man is travelling across a desert, and the desert 
is sometimes blazing hot. Mankind is always on 
the point of withering, wilting, fainting because 
of the intensity of the heat of the day, and the 
Hebrew prophet thinking of the refreshment which 
the Messiah was going to bring, could think of no 
lovelier and more restful image than this: He shall be 


92 NATURE SERMONS 


“as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.” 
There is a shadow which all of us are in love with— 
that is the shadow cast by the earth. Night is but a 
shadow, and at the end of every day, we creep round 
and throw ourselves down in this shadow and go to 
sleep. God takes the blanket of the night—and what 
is the blanket of the night but a shadow?—and this 
our heavenly Father spreads out over us and tucks 
it carefully in round us, and says to us, “ Now, you 
may go to sleep.” God giveth His beloved sleep, but 
we could not sleep so well were it not that He covers 
us with a shadow. 

And if the shadow of night is our friend, we have 
a right to believe that the shadow of death is our 
friend. When the Hebrew poet thought of death it 
did not affright him. He knew it was only a shadow, 
and a shadow with refreshment in it. “Though I 
walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I 
will fear no evil,” because the same God that is 
over us through the night will be with us in the midst 
of death. After we pass into that shadow we shall 
be refreshed. 

Why do we have shadows? It is solely because of 
the existence of light. If there were no light there 
could be no shadows. The more light the more 
shadows. ‘The intenser the light the deeper the — 
shadows. One of the reasons why the Grand Canyon 
in Colorado is so indescribably beautiful is because of 
the richness of the shadows, and the richness of the 
shadows is due to the extraordinary luminosity of the 
heavens above the canyon. In that marvellous at- 
mosphere the sun has a.potency which he does not 
have in our sky, and the wonders he works far sur- 
pass any of the wonders which we know. Not a little 


SHADOWS 93, 


of the indescribable loveliness of the canyon is due 
to the richness of the many-coloured shadows with 
which it is filled. 

It was once my fortune to be in the city of Athens 
in the month of August. Athens, as you know, is a 
city of white. The Athens sky is often without a 
cloud, the sunlight flooding the streets of the white 
city producing a glare which almost dazzles the eyes. 
I was profoundly impressed, not only by the sunlight, 
but by the intensity of the shadows. There is a shadow 
which now lies across the world. It is a shadow cast 
by the late war. War is nothing new in this world. 
There has been war, so far as we know, from the 
beginning. But never has war cast a shadow com- 
parable in blackness with the shadow which now lies 
on mankind. ‘There have been military generals in 
all centuries—a thousand red-handed butchers have 
caused the earth to run red with blood, but never 
before has the world been under a shadow so deep 
and so awful as the shadow which oppresses human 
hearts to-day. How can you account for that? The 
only explanation is because of the intensity of the light. 
There is more of the light of the God of love that 
shines in the face of Jesus Christ than there has ever 
been in this world before. And it is because of the 
intensity of that light that we have the awful black- 
ness of the shadow. ‘The Indians once inhabited the 
land which is now ours. They were always fight- 
ing, but their wars cast no shadow because America 
in those days was dark. It is only because of the 
light that falls on us from the face of God’s only 
begotten Son that war casts a shadow which lies like 
a beam of night across the tortured heart of the world. 

And so there are two kinds of shadows: a shadow 


94 NATURE SERMONS 


that refreshes and a shadow that oppresses, a shadow 
that enlivens and a shadow that deadens. Simon 
Peter cast a shadow that healed. ‘That is a won- 
derfully interesting incident recorded in the fifth 
chapter of the book of The Acts, where we are told 
that people having invalids in their homes brought them 
out and laid them on beds and couches along the 
streets through which Peter was to pass, hoping that 
his shadow might overshadow them. Simon Peter 
stood between Jesus Christ and the world. The man 
who stands with the light of Christ on him will cast 
a shadow that has healing in it. You and I, if our 
attitude to the Eternal be right, will cast a shadow that 
will bring health and strength to all on whom it falls. 
I hope that this sermon may be a sermon casting a 
shadow (like that of Peter’s) on you wherever you 
go, and that out of its shadow you may derive health 
and strength and peace. 


Vill 
SOUNDS 


N this sermon we take a new departure. I in- 
| vite you to come with me into the world of the 
ear. Our theme is “ Sounds.” 

I should like at the start to divide sounds into two 
classes—noises and tones. A noise is usually loud, 
disagreeable and meaningless. A tone is a modulated 
sound, and it expresses something. I wonder if it 
would be correct to say that there are no noises in 
Nature. Nature has only tones, while noises are con- 
fined to the human world. For instance, the murmur 
of a brook is a tone, one of the most soothing and 
delicate of sounds, a dainty and exquisite form of 
music. ‘There is no sound at all like it in a city. 
Compare the tone of a brook with the clatter and 
racket of an elevated train. The latter is noise. Or, 
compare the breaking of crockery with the breaking 
of waves. The first is discordant and disagreeable, 
whereas the latter is soft and brings pleasure to the 
heart. When a wave slips up on the sand and breaks 
there, it gives forth a sound which the ear loves. Or, 
compare the whispering of leaves with the uproar of 
a machine-shop. ‘The clank of the machinery deafens 
us and makes us want to get away, but there is no 
sound more agreeable than the sound which the wind 
makes in the tops of the trees. Nature produces tones 
—the human world creates noises. 

You are probably thinking of an exception. You 
think of thunder, and you say: “‘ That is noise.” I 
wonder if itis? Itis loud, but is it disagreeable? It 


Preached, May 26, 1918. 
95 


96 NATURE SERMONS 


is disagreeable to many of us because it is associated 
with lightning. We are afraid of lightning, and that 
makes us dislike thunder. But if we could have 
thunder separated from lightning, I believe we should 
love it. It would be like a deep. bass tone of an 
organ—it would be the rumble of the chariot wheels of 
God along the highways of the skies. 

And so men find themselves exclaiming: “ Oh, that 
I could get out into the fields!” Why? Because of 
the beauty there? Not entirely, but also because of 
the quiet. We love the fields because there are no 
noises there. “ Oh, that I could plunge into the woods 
and stay there a whole week!” Why into the woods? 
Because they are fragrant? ‘That is only one rea- 
son. ‘There is a deeper reason. We love the woods 
because of their delicious quiet. ‘There are no noises 
in the woods. “Oh, that I could get down by the 
sea! Give me a cottage by the sea, with the windows 
all open day and night!” But it is noisy by the sea! 
No it is not. ‘The sea roars. Yes, it roars, but its 
roar is not the roar of the street. Byron was right 
when he said: “There is music in its roar.” The 
voice of the ocean is soft. There are no jagged edges. 
It is huge, but it is velvety. You can lie down and 
go to sleep with the huge voice of the ocean lying in 
each ear. 3 | 

Nature is never silent. She cannot be silent, be- 
cause she is so intensely alive. She is always doing 
something. She is always saying something. There 
is no such thing as silence on the face of the earth. In 
the book of. The Revelation John says that “ there 
was silence in heaven for the space of half an hour.” 
No such half an hour was ever known on earth. 
There are always voices in the ear. I never knew what 


SOUNDS 97 


silence is until, one day, 1 went into the Mammoth 
Cave of Kentucky. ‘The guide left me for a minute 
or two and I had a chance to listen to the silence. I 
had never heard it before. At first it was wonderful, 
then it grew to be terrible, and then it became horrible, 
unendurable. I do not believe a man could live long 
in absolute silence without going insane. 

We are not created for silence. We live in a uni- 
verse which is always saying something. We live, 
and move, and have our being in an ocean of sounds. 
We hear only an infinitesimal fraction of them all. 
We say, of some people, that they are hard of hear- . 
ing. We are all hard of hearing. Not one of us 
hears a fraction of what is going on. Our senses are 
dull. Even the eye is stupid. It cannot see a million 
beauties which lie all around it. We see only a few 
colours. The eye can catch light vibrations up to 
seven hundred and twenty-seven trillions a second, but 
beyond that it is impotent. We can see violet, but all 
the colours above violet are beyond us. Millions of 
colours are hidden from us. If we could come back 
sometime with new eyes, we would not recognize the 
old earth. It would be a billion times more beautiful 
than we had ever dreamed. All that we see is only 
a tiny island in a measureless ocean. ‘The ear is still 
duller than the eye. It is exceedingly clumsy. As 
soon as a sound passes twenty thousand vibrations a 
second, the ear begins to balk. At twenty-five thou- 
sand vibrations per second, most ears are out of com- 
mission, and at thirty thousand per second, the ear 
is completely undone. ‘There are millions of sounds 
which the ear never reports to the mind. It cannot. 
The truth is, we are almost deaf. All that we hear, 
is as a small island, in the midst of a measureless sea. 


98 NATURE SERMONS 


Our civilization does not help us. Our education 
does not carry us forward. Progress seems to 
atrophy the ear. We do not hear so well as bar- 
barians—not nearly so well as savages. The Indians 
who lived here when Henry Hudson called on them 
had ears far keener than ours. We are not even the 
equals of the animals. We speak of the inferior 
creatures. How they must laugh at us! ‘They can 
see things we cannot see, and hear things we cannot 
hear. Walk through the woods with a dog, and you 
are at once aware of your limitations. He is alive to 
things of which you know nothing. As compared 
with you, he is, in certain points, a superior creature. 
Many of us make ourselves worse than we need to be. 
We do not cultivate our ears. Like all other senses, 
the sense of hearing can be wonderfully improved. 
We lose more than we know through our sins of 
omission. We do not cultivate the auditory nerve. 
We rob ourselves of pleasure which God intended us 
to have. ‘I'wo men take a stroll through the woods. 
One hears nothing but the crows. They are the end 
men of Nature’s minstrel-troop. Their coarse jokes 
can be appreciated even by the dullest intelligence. 
But the man by his side can hear, not only the crow, 
but also the thrush, and the cedar bird, and also the 
thousands of twitterings and chirpings and gurglings 
and purlings and murmurings and ripplings and 
tinklings on which, as on an ocean, the whole creation 
seems to float. Sounds are arranged in Strata. 
There are some sounds as big as cobblestones. When 
they strike the ear-drum, we know that they exist. 
Under these there are sounds much sweeter, no larger 
than little pebbles. And under these there are 
sounds sweeter still, sounds which may be com- 


SOUNDS 99 


pared to tiny shells, and underneath these there 
are what ought to be called microscopic sounds, in- 
finitesimal particles, the dust, as it were, of sound. 
Blest is the man who in Springtime can catch up at 
least a few of the musical vibrations which lie at the 
basis of the world! 

The sounds of Nature would deafen us if they were 
not so soft. Lear in speaking of Cordelia said, “ Her 
voice was ever soft, gentle and low.” We may call 
Nature, God’s Cordelia, and Humanity is His Goneril. 
The voice of Goneril is shrill and rasping. Cordelia’s 
voice is ever low and sweet. The worst feature of a 
great city is its noise. Noise is an enemy of life, 
and it is amazing that so little has been done as yet 
to conquer it. We have subdued a thousand enemies, 
but this furious foe still lords it over us. You can 
measure the civilization of a city by the noises it 
submits to. My professor in philosophy used to deny 
that man is a rational creature. In our self-com- 
placent moods we like to think he is, and we pride 
ourselves on our use of the reason. But my professor 
did not relish such optimism. He claimed that man 
is not yet a rational creature. He is a candidate for 
rationality. He may become rational if he works and 
grows, but he is not rational yet. 

I have sometimes wondered if we have not gone'too 
far in claiming to be civilized. Is not that word too 
ambitious, too pretentious? Certainly we are not 
civilized yet—if you give the word any worthy signif- 
icance. If we were really civilized, we should never 
submit to half the noises by which we are afflicted in 
this city. No city that is truly civilized would allow 
an elevated railroad to run through it. To compel 
women and children to sleep along the line of such a 


100 NATURE SERMONS 


road is an atrocity. <A civilized community would not 
permit it. If we were civilized, the orchestras in half 
the hotels and restaurants of this city would be sent 
to the Tombs as disturbers of the peace. If we were 
civilized, these loud-mouthed hucksters who scream the 
prices of strawberries and turnips, would all be sent - 
to Sing Sing. And if our civilization were more than 
skin-deep, these noisy villains who shout out “‘ extras ” 
with nothing in them at ten o'clock at night, would 
have been incarcerated long ago. The noises which 
we permit prove that we are yet in the lower stages of 
barbarism. When the world becomes civilized, the 
cities will be quiet. The cities will sit at the feet of 
Nature and learn of her. 

The sounds of Nature are soft, gentle and low. The 
voice of water is a gentle voice. Water never stands 
still if it can help it. It wants to run in order that it 
may make music. A brook is always vocal. ‘The 
poets say that a brook sings, and the poets are right. 
A brook laughs when its feet are tickled by the im- 
pertinent pebbles. When water gets a chance it falls. 
A. waterfall gives forth a refreshing sound. When 
you find, somewhere in the woods, a little waterfall, 
you want to sit down by the side of it and listen to 
its music. There is something in the sound of falling — 
water which banishes care and brings refreshment to 
the soul. Even a gigantic waterfall is restful. 
Niagara’s voice is soft. Billions of drops of water 
roll their tiny voices into one huge sound, but the 
sound retains its softness. ‘The mighty cataract wraps 
you up as ina blanket. There are no rough edges, no 
ragged ends, nothing to scratch or cut or lacerate. 
There is soothing in the roar of Niagara. Rain is 
one form of falling water, and different rains have 


SOUNDS 101 


different voices. Rain upon the roof gives forth one 
sort of music, and rain upon a lake gives forth a 
music that is different. And rain upon the grass 
produces a music which is different still. 

One night, last summer, I heard something in the 
grass outside my bedroom window, and I said: “‘ Who 
is there?”’ At once the reply came back: “It is the 
rain. I am just watering the grass,’ and I said: 
“Oh!” and then went to sleep. In the morning I 
began to think of what happened the night before. I 
thought of the humility of the rain, and its unostenta- 
tious way of doing things. If aman wants to water 
a few square yards of lawn, he gets a hose and squirts 
and squirts, and makes a fearful ado over his little 
job, ending, at last, both wet and tired. But the rain 
will take a township or a county, or an entire com- 
monwealth, watering thousands of acres of grass, and 
do it easily and quietly, saying softly: “I am just 
watering the grass.” It is the softness of it all which 
is surprising. Nature is so gentle. She runs about 
in velvet slippers as though she were a nurse in a 
hospital, and one can almost hear her saying: “ Poor 
people, I know you are tired and sick—all worn out 
by the fearful noises of the city—and it is because I 
know how sick you are that I make just as little noise 
as possible!” , 

The wind is no less musical than the rain. The 
wind is the big boy of Nature. The wind is never 
still, and the wind is always bent on having a good 
time. The wind loves to play with everything that 
it passes. It is especially fond of trees. To the wind 
a tree is a big toy, and the wind loves to convert a 
tree intoaharp. ‘The leaves are the strings, and from 
these the wind strikes forth music. It plays with 


102 NATURE SERMONS 


every sort of tree. Some one has suggested that if 
our ears were only cultivated we could distinguish the 
different tones produced by different trees. We could 
tell the tone of an oak from an ash, and the ash from 
the beech, and the beech from the birch, and the birch 
from the elm. ‘The wind loves them all, and plays on 
them all, and which one of them does he like best? 
I wonder! All the tones are soft, and to lie in one’s 
bed, at night, and listen to the wind in the trees is a 
joy. 

When we enter the world of animate things, the 
variety of the sounds increases. ‘There is a vast world 
of insects, and another vast world of birds, and in all 
of these worlds streams of sound are perpetually 
flowing. Spring is especially vocal. I wonder why 
Spring is the favourite month with a majority of 
people? Is it not because it is so rich in sounds? 
Nature seems bursting with life, and she has more to 
tell you than she can possibly express. A thousand 
sounds float through the fields and the woods, and 
many of them come from baby forms of life. Living 
things by the million are there in their cradles, and 
those numberless and scarcely audible melodies and 
harmonious warblings and whisperings are the cooings 
of the babies in the great Nature nursery. It is these 
immeasurable and indescribably sweet cooings which 
find the corpuscles of our blood and set them all 
dancing. 

The most musical parts of the day are morning and 
evening. No one can afford to sleep late in the 
country in the summer time. Every June, when I go 
to New Hampshire, Summer meets me at the station 
and says: “ Poor man, I see you are all cut and bleed- 
ing. The jagged noises of the city have left you in 


SOUNDS 103 


a deplorable condition, and I am going now to wrap 
you in a blanket of bird-notes, and every morning and 
every evening I am going to apply to your ear-drums 
a poultice of beautiful pulverized sounds, and I think 
in a short time you will be completely well again.” 
How I love the morning! What an orchestra I have. 
I feel like aking. I wonder sometimes in what world 
I am. After floating on a sea of iron vibrations 
through Autumn and Winter and Spring, I feel in 
Summer that I am drifting on an ocean of vibrations 
soft as gossamer. I am supported and carried on 
by the soft and tiny notes of birds. The age of iron 
has gone. A heavenly age has come, and the elevated 
trains and the iron hoofs of horses cease from 
troubling and the weary heart has a chance to rest. 
There is only one loud voice in the morning—the 
rooster. It stands out clear and distinct from all the 
others. He has lived so long with people that he has 
taken on some of their brag and strut. A rooster is 
not a part of Nature. He is a feature of our human 
world. His voice has been coarsened and loudened 
by human contact. The voices of Nature’s birds are 
all gentle, low and soft. 

It is not till evening that Nature brings out her full 
orchestra. I do not know how many pieces are in 
it, for it is invisible. Richard Wagner, in his opera 
house at Bayreuth, would not allow his orchestra to 
be seen. He was an artist. He could hear as few 
mortals have ever been able to hear. He would not 
allow the eye to interfere with the ear. He refused to 
permit the eye to break the illusion which the orchestra 
was creating, and so he hid the orchestra out of sight, 
thrusting it under the stage so that the audience could 
not see the shirt-fronts of the first violinists or the 


104 NATURE, SERMONS 


puffed cheeks of the men who were blowing the horns, 
or the antics of the men who were pounding the drums, 
or tapping the triangle. 

Wagner got the hint from Nature. Nature hides 
her orchestra. I do not know how many instruments 
there are in the great orchestra which plays for me 
on the evenings of July and August. A grand opera 
orchestra has about eighty-five pieces, sometimes the 
number is increased to one hundred, and occasionally, 
at extraordinary functions, two or three hundred in- 
struments are brought together. But Nature never 
stops with such paltry numbers. She has four hun- 
dred, five hundred, six hundred, sometimes one thou- 
sand instruments in her orchestra. All the performers 
play by ear, and their music is wonderfully soothing 
and soft. It is said there are less than sixty symphony 
orchestras in the United States. These are in the 
large cities, and only a small fraction of the popula- 
tion can ever hear them. But God is desirous that 
every one shall hear music, and so He stations His 
own orchestras all round every city, and one in every 
village, and in every hamlet, in the neighbourhood of 
every farmhouse throughout the land, that all His 
children may have the culture which comes from 
listening to good music. 

All this suggests various piercing questions: Why 
these sounds? Why these orchestras? I have spoken 
of my orchestra. It plays for me, but does it play 
for me alone? It would be flattering to my vanity 
to say it did. One might know at once that it was a 
man who wrote the story of the Garden of Eden, 
because he placed man at the top. He put everything 
under him. Even the sun and moon and stars. were 
created to serve him. That is the way of man. It is © 


SOUNDS 105 


natural for us to think that all the inferior creatures 
exist for us. But I cannot bring myself to think that 
my orchestra exists for me alone. It plays when I 
am not there. It was playing before I was born. It 
will keep on playing after I am dead. It is playing 
for some one else besides me. I wonder if it plays 
for the bird creation and the insect creation and the 
animal creation? Does the whippoorwill enjoy the 
bullfrog, and does the bullfrog take delight in the owl, 
and does the owl revel in the music of the katydid, 
and is the katydid enraptured by the music of the 
cricket? Do these musicians play for one another, 
and do they have ears enabling them to enjoy har- 
monies which lie beyond our reach? 

Why should it be deemed incredible that God should 
provide for the esthetic enjoyment of all His crea- 
tures? We have got far enough along in our re- 
ligious thinking to see that He provides food for 
all His creatures in due season. Why should we 
hesitate to believe that He provides music for all His 
creatures? It may be true for birds and insects, as 
it is for us, that they cannot live on bread alone, but 
must live on many words which proceed from the 
mouth of God. It may be that the music of the 
morning and the evening is for human beings, and also 
for creatures which belong to a different order. Pos- 
sibly we ought to go further and say that these or- 
chestras play for God. He created all these creatures. 
The orchestration is all His. He taught the musicians 
how to play. They play for Him. He is the King. 
We overhear. If that be true I can understand why 
I like this music. I like it because God likes it. Iam 
created in His image. I like the things which He 
likes, when I am living at my best. I like the music 


106 NATURE SERMONS 


of the evening woods and fields, and it is then I am 
at my best. Care is rolled away—troubles no longer 
vex me. Engagements do not call me. I can live. 
And when I am living at my best I like the symphony 
concert of the fields. God no doubt likes it too. We 
enjoy it together. That is why my enjoyment is so 
high and sweet. 

And so, in the sounds of Nature, we have a revela- 
tion of the Almighty. God is so great He cannot 
report Himself to the eye alone. He rolls the universe 
up to the eye-gate of the soul, but the eye cannot take 
it all in. There are things which cannot be told to 
the eye. The eye falls down saying—‘ Glory and 
blessing and honour and dominion to Him who sits 
on the throne.’’ Other things must be told to the ear. 
When the ear receives the story, it too falls down say- 
ing, “ Blessing and honour and glory and power to 
Him who sits on the throne.” 

A picture is a form of beauty. God lays it before 
the eye. Music is a form of beauty. God lays it 
before the ear. But God tells the ear something He 
cannot tell the eye. We know that God is a God of 
power. We can see it by looking at the ocean. We 
know He is a God of beauty. We can see it by look- 
ing at the flowers. We know He is a God of order. 
We can see it by looking at the stars. But I want to 
know more than this. I want to know if He is gentle, 
if He is tender? ‘To know this, He must speak to 
me. A mother can show her little child something of 
her tenderness in her eye and in her smile. The baby 
can catch some of her kindness through its eyes. But 
when tenderness reaches its climax the mother speaks, 
she hums, she sings. She can tell more of what is 
in her heart through her voice than in any other way. 


SOUNDS 107 


Alma Gluck tells us that when she was a little girl, 
and all her family were poor and hungry, her mother 
used to sing her to sleep. That is what mothers do, 
all the way round the world. When their babies are 
tired and fretful, they sing to them. They close the 
gates of the day with a tone, and there is no tone 
so sweet as that which a mother makes when she is 
singing her baby to sleep. It has become a saying 
in all languages: “Sweet as a mother’s lullaby.” 
Through the sounds of Nature, God sings to us. In 
this way He tells us of His gentleness and tenderness 
and love. 

‘It is said that Helen Keller, when she was taken 
for the first time into a cemetery, burst into tears. 
She was blind and deaf. Nobody had told her about 
cemeteries. Nobody had informed her that the car- 
riage, on that day, was to roll into a city of the dead. 
But when she found herself inside the gate of the 
cemetery, she knew she was in some place where she 
had never been before, and began to cry. Things are 
said to us which do not pass through the ear. There 
are sounds too ethereal for the ear to take note of. 
They are caught up by the spirit. When I get into 
the woods, I am sometimes so inexpressibly happy that 
I stand in amazement at my own rapture. I cannot 
account for it. It is not caused by the birds or the 
trees or the wild flowers. It is not due to the fra- 
grance or the sights or the sounds. My explanation is 
this: Somebody is saying something to me—something 
wonderfully pleasant. Somebody is saying: “I love 
you!” 


IX 
MISTS 


“ Sounds.” In this sermon I am going to direct 

your attention to something that is incapable of 
sound. A mist has no voice, it never speaks. It is 
a deaf mute. This is an impressive fact when you 
remember that the mist is always moving, and that 
nearly everything that moves makes a noise. A mist 
moves and it gives forth no sound. A mist can move 
down one of the streets of our city without letting 
you know, so far as your ears report, that it is present. 
It is many times the size of a furniture van, and yet 
it can glide over the cobblestones without making a 
noise. A little motor cycle puffs and snorts and makes 
a great ado as it goes on its way, but a mist as high 
as the Singer Building can travel from Harlem River 
to the Battery without making a sound. It seems al- 
most human, and says: “ Poor New York, you are 
plagued enough already by your noises, I will not 
add another sound to your bedlam.” 

Mists walk through our streets in velvet slippers. 
A mist makes no noise upon the water. Nothing else 
can move upon the water without making a sound. A 
ferry-boat splashes and churns the water into foam. 
It cannot move without making a sound, nor can a 
tugboat move three yards without announcing the 
fact to both banks of the river. A submarine can- 
not move even below the surface of the sea without 
making a noise. That is what led to the defeat of 
Preached, June 8, 1919. 


N my previous sermon we were thinking about 


108 


MISTS 109 


that little devil. Its propellers always made a noise, 
and so the Allies improvised ears for their destroyers, 
so that every time a submarine moved a destroyer 
could tell where it was. If the Germans had only 
known how to make a silent U boat the outcome of 
the war might have been different from what it was. 
If Germany had been able to get rid of the vibrations 
of the propellers, then the stream of war might have 
been turned into a new channel. ‘The mist can travel 
from Sandy Hook to Albany and not make a sound. 

Mists are also silent in the fields. They travel 
across the meadows, through the valleys, up the hills 
without making the slightest noise. I have got up at 
night often to see them from my window, and have 
been deeply impressed by their noiselessness. ‘They 
climb over a stone fence without dislodging a stone, 
they move under the boughs of the apple trees with- 
out crackling a twig, they walk over the tops of the 
trees without bending a leaf. ‘They seem almost like 
ghosts, spectral spirits of some other world. ‘There is 
something uncanny in their silence. ‘‘ Where are you 
going?” I have sometimes called after them, but I 
never received any reply. This fact becomes all the 
_ more impressive when you remember that it is a fact 
old as the world. Mists are among the oldest of the 
earth’s inhabitants. Mists were made before man. 
Possibly you have forgotten the second chapter of 
Genesis. In one verse we are told that a mist went 
up from the earth, and in the next verse we are told 
that man was created. In other words, the mist was 
made first, and then man. ‘The mist was permitted to 
stand at man’s cradle, but it stood there dumb. Job 
says that when the cornerstone of the earth was laid 
the morning stars sang together. There is no Bible 


110 NATURE SERMONS 


writer that has ever suggested that the mists ever sang. 
Millions of them have existed on the earth, and the 
earth, perhaps, has existed millions of years, and yet 
from the Creation to the present hour, no mist has 
ever given forth a sound. 

This is all the more remarkable when you bear in 
mind that water everywhere is vocal. Water likes to 
speak. Water will speak whenever it has a chance. 
Rain, for instance, always makes a sound. A dash- 
ing rain makes a large sound, a rain falling upon a 
tin roof is easily heard, a rain falling upon blades of 
grass, upon the leaves of trees, also gives forth a 
sound. Rain-drops falling on the petals of roses make 
a sound. You may call that the whisper of water. 
Is there a sweeter whisper in all the world? A brook 
is always full of sound. If a brook did not speak 
the poets would not like it. It prattles, it babbles, 
Tennyson says it chatters. It will coo and prattle ail 
the day long like a baby in a cradle. A brook that 
does not speak is abnormal. Rivers also are vocal, 
especially when they leap from a precipice. When 
they leap they laugh or they shout. The Montmorency 
River, for instance, laughs when it jumps. The Yel- 
lowstone River shouts when it jumps. A river in the 
act of jumping always seems to cry out at the top of its 
voice—* Look at me, I am leaping!” 

The ocean, also, is vocal. It is never content to be 
still. On hot summer afternoons, as it glides up on 
the sand, it hums a soothing tune. It bellows and 
thunders and roars whenever a storm teases it. Now 
a mist is a form of water, but water in the form of 
mist never speaks. 

Moreover, you cannot compel it to speak. If you 
poke a fire it sputters, if you throw a stone in a lake 


MISTS III 


you make a splash, if you strike any metal you bring 
out a sound. You cannot bring out a sound from 
a mist. You may stab it, club it, trample upon it, 
and still it is silent. ven when the wind shoves it 
to the right and the left, harasses it and insults it, 
it still remains dumb. ‘The wind may tear it to pieces, 
but it makes no reply. 

The impressiveness of the silence of the mist be- 
comes almost tragic when you bear in mind what the 
voice of water is. The Beloved Disciple, when he 
sought for a symbol to picture the voice of the om- 
nipotent Jesus, chose the voice of water. The exile 
on Patmos listening to the music of the Divine Voice 
heard it and said that it reminded him of water. Of 
all the thousands of sounds on the face of the earth 
the only sound which was chosen as the fittest symbol 
for expressing the timbre of the voice of the Eter- 
nal, was the voice of water. A mist, although water, 
cannot speak. It would almost seem as though God 
had pronounced a curse on the mist. ‘The Bible says 
that God pronounced a curse on the serpent: “ You 
shall go on your belly,” He said. To the mist He 
said: “‘ You shall wander round the world, but never 
shall you be permitted to speak.” 

Now let us pause long enough to find out what a 
mist is. According to the dictionary, a mist is water- 
vapour suspended in the air and visible. There is 
much water-vapour in the air which is not visible. 
Water-vapour that cannot be seen is not mist, but 
whenever the water-vapour which is suspended in the 
air becomes visible, we have a name for it, and the 
name is “mist.” Now there is a family of mists, and 
each member of the family is called by a different 
name. Some morning on going down the street you 


112 NATURE SERMONS 


say: “ How hazy it is!”” Haze is a mist, a thin mist. 
Some other morning on going out of the front door 
you say: “ How foggy it is!” Fog is a mist, a thick 
mist. Here then we have three sisters—haze and 
mist and fog. ‘The first is thin, the second is medium, 
the third is thick; but all are mists. [here is an- 
other member of the family, and this fourth member 
of the family does not live on the earth, it lives in the 
sky. A cloud is a mist, and it differs from a haze and 
a fog in the fact that it inhabits the regions of the 
upper air. You might say that a mist is a cloud that 
has fallen upon the earth. You might say that a 
cloud is a mist which has ascended into heaven. We 
are interested, however, just now, not in the cloud; 
we are interested in the three sisters who make their 
home on the earth. 

First of all, let us think of the beauty of a mist. 
There is a wide variety of colours. Some mists are 
white and some are green, some black, some blue, 
some purple, and some crimson—all the colours of the 
rainbow are exhibited in the world of mists. Mists 
are also of different textures. Some mists are coarse 
and others are fine. ‘The London mist, for instance, 
is often exceedingly coarse and black. ‘The mist that 
fills the streets of Edinburgh is a fine mist, entirely 
different in texture from the mist of the English 
metropolis. ‘The forms of the mists are beautiful, and 
moreover they are always changing. ‘The Greeks had 
a god whom they called Proteus. The wonderful 
thing about him was, that whenever anybody laid hold 
of him, he immediately changed his form. ‘That is 
what a mist is always doing. Whenever the wind puts 
its hand on it, it immediately assumes a different 
shape. But all the forms of the mist are picturesque. 


MISTS 113 


What do you suppose the mists are for? I some- 
times think that they are the playthings of God. Has 
it ever occurred to you that our Heavenly Father is a 
playing God? I think we are entirely justified in as- 
suming that He is. ‘The play instinct is deep-rooted 
in animal nature. It is an inseparable part of our 
human nature. All young animals play. Little chil- 
dren do nothing else. Now Jesus says, “ Unless you 
become as a little child you cannot enter the kingdom 
of God.” Unless you know how to play, then you 
are out of place in God’s universe. That would indi- 
cate to my mind that the Head of that universe takes 
delight in playing. One of the interesting chapters of 
our modern civilization deals with the attention which 
is being paid to the play-instinct. We are coming to 
see that children not only may play, but must play. If 
they do not play they become physically stunted, mor- 
ally paralyzed. Playgrounds are just as essential to a 
great city as our churches and schools. 

I, for one, believe that God loves play, and that He 
plays Himself. I think that some of His playthings 
are mists. You have all seen children playing with 
blocks. They take delight in building them in different 
forms: they build a pagoda, and when it is built they 
tear it down in order to build a castle. When a castle 
is built they throw it over in order to build a cottage. 
When the cottage is built they demolish it in order to 
make room for a railroad-station. The pleasure lies 
in building one thing after another. That is the way 
God acts with the mists. I have often watched Him 
on summer mornings. He never grows weary of 
making new things out of the mists. One minute He 
is making a lake, five minutes later He is making a 
river, five minutes later He is making a mountain, a 


114 NATURE SERMONS 


little later He is making a bank of snow, a little later 
He has made a great city with domes and towers and 
minarets. I know He enjoys it for it is something He 
has been doing since the Creation. 

God also makes use of mists as decorations. He 
adorns the old, prosaic earth and makes it look poetic 
and mystical. ‘There are artists who claim that Lon- 
don is never so beautiful as it is when it is buried in 
mist. ‘The mist tones down the discords of clashing 
colours, it transfigures the bleakness of the prosaic. 
A city loses much of its sordidness if you can only 
half-cover it with mist. The dullest and most unin- 
teresting city becomes dreamy and fascinating when 
you clothe it in robes of vapour. San Francisco is 
one of the most picturesque of American cities. Its 
picturesqueness lies in the fact that it is built largely 
on hills. The mists love hills, and that city is never 
so beautiful as when God has dressed it in mist. 
Somebody has said that the city looks like a Francis- 
can friar with his robe of gray, another, that it looks 
like a beautiful girl clothed in a garb of drab. The 
hillsides never look so charming as when the mists lie 
on them, and the houses on the tops of the hills never 


look so much like palaces, as when they are half-hidden 


in the fog. 

I presume it would be correct to say that Nature 
is a daughter of God. At any rate, we always as- 
sume she is a woman. Nobody, when referring to 
Nature, ever uses the pronoun “ he”; and the reason 
we assume Nature to be a woman is undoubtedly due 
to the fact that she is so beautiful. Now if we wish 
to speak of mists in terms of a woman’s wardrobe, 
then we may say that mists are veils. A haze is a 
thin veil, whereas a fog is a thick one. Nature changes 


MASTS ot) 115 


the thickness of her veil, from time to time, in order 
to escape monotony. To change the figure we may 
say that a mist is a shirt-waist which Nature puts on, 
on summer mornings, in order to enhance her loveli- 
ness. Sometimes the shirt-waist is opaque, sometimes 
it is exceedingly thin. It would seem that the AI- 
mighty takes delight in changing the aspect of Nature 
in order that we may never get tired of her. We do 
not want a woman to look for evermore the same. 
The human heart loves variety, and we insist that a 
woman shall look different at different times. God 
does not permit Nature to be for evermore the same. 
He changes her appearance by robing her with 
different varieties of mists. She isa sort of Cleopatra 
in the powers of her fascination, and we can say of 
her, what Shakespeare said of the Queen of Egypt: 


“Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale 
Her infinite variety.” 


Did you ever think of the strength of the mist? 
When we think of power, we naturally think of the 


_ wind, or the water, or of chemical explosives, but there 


is not one of them that has greater power than the 
mist. The mist can go into the biggest city of the 
world and turn all the lights down. What other 
power under heaven can do that? London has a Lord 
Mayor and a Court of Aldermen. They are supposed 
to have control over the city, but a mist can come in 
and turn down the lights in all the public buildings, 
and in every private home of the world’s metropolis. 
It is an interesting fact that mist has a peculiar an- 
tipathy to electric lights. A gas-jet will throw a beam 
farther into the mist than will an arc-lamp. It would 
seem as though the mist had a malicious pleasure in 


116 NATURE SERMONS 


saying: “I do not care anything for your new-fangled 
light, I will put it out.” And so lighthouses are of 
little value in a mist. Almost every year some mighty 
steamer goes to wreck right under the eyes of a light- 
house. There is something in a mist that defies the 
piercing power of electricity. 

We have heard a great deal within the last quarter 
of a century about the tremendous power of com- 
merce. Panegyrics innumerable have been sounded in 
regard to its ever-extending dominion. New York 
City is the greatest commercial city in the New World, 
but we are absolutely helpless in the hands of a mist. 
Every now and then you awaken in the morning to 
the sound of the sirens and whistles and fog-horns 
of the Hudson River. Every vessel on the river is 
shouting at the top of its voice: “ We are all-in con- 
fusion out here. The mist has taken us by the throat 
and will not let us go.”’ What other power is there 
in the world that will retard all the traffic in the Hud- 
son and throw it into confusion? But the East River 
is equally helpless. The Fall River boats are mighty 
vessels. They have little fear of a storm. But when 
a heavy mist settles down on the East River then the 
Fall River boats lie tied up at their piers. They dare > 
not try to make their way through Hell Gate in a 
mist. Even our harbour becomes dangerous. When 
a fog comes in, great ocean liners remain below quar- 
antine afraid to venture to their docks. Great steam- 
ships lying at their docks eager to start out for Europe, 
are afraid to venture out until the mist announces 
that they may go. That is an amazing spectacle—the 
traffic of the metropolis of the New World under the 
dictation of a mist. We would not allow Germany to 
dictate to us when our ships should come in, or when 


‘ MISTS iit? 


they could go out again, and yet we bow in meek 
submission to the autocracy of the mist. A mist is 
one of God’s traffic squad, and when it holds up its 
finger all the great ships stop on their courses, and 
when the mist gives another signal the great ships 
proceed on their way. 

A traveller soon comes to put a new emphasis upon 
the authority of a mist. Some of the keenest disap- 
pointments that a traveller knows are due to the in- 
terference of the mist. Some of you have gone to the 
top of Mount Washington to secure a lovely view, 
but there was no view because of the mist. Some of 
you have gone to the top of Mount Pilatus. You 
had read for years about that famous view. Your 
fellow-travellers had told you much about it, but when 
you arrived at Lucerne, you discovered that it was 
impossible to see anything from the top of the famous 
mountain. I travelled all the way to Alaska, once, 
to see the famous Muir glacier, but when I got there 
a mist put its broad hand over the face of the glacier 
saying-—‘‘ Not to-day!” A mist speaks as one hav- 
ing authority, and not like the wind or the waves. 

One of the greatest dangers of ocean-travel is the 
mist. You waken some morning, to hear the steam- 
whistle blowing. On looking out, you discover there 
is a mist. The ship is not afraid of a storm. The 
modern ship rather likes a storm. As soon as she 
sees a storm she stiffens herself and almost leaps for- 
_ ward to meet it. But as soon as a ship sees a fog 
the ship is frightened. Up to this time she has been 
an ocean greyhound, now she degenerates into a tor- 
toise before the fog. She had held her head high, 
but now she goes down on her knees. A mist is the 
terror of the sea because there is no telling when it 


118 NATURE SERMONS 


may have an iceberg wrapped up in its gossamer folds. 
Why do you suppose the heart is so disquieted by 
that regular blowing of the ship’s whistle at an in- 
terval of a few seconds? The ship is saying: “I am 
afraid. I am afraid! I am afraid!” and the fear 
communicates itself to the soul. Birds do not fly in 
a fog, nor do birds sing in a fog, nor do birds issue a 
callina fog. The fog makes them afraid. Here, then, 
is a remarkable fact, that one of the servants of God 
with fingers that are spectral—not even skeleton 
fingers because skeleton fingers are solid, but with 
nothing but phantom fingers—can take the world by 
the throat, and hold it fast. 

In some respects, we might say that the mist is an 
enemy of the human race. There are many acts of 
destruction which it commits upon the land. When 
a great fog lies for weeks upon London it lowers the 
vitality of the whole city. It snuffs out human lives 
by the thousand. If you have ever looked at the vital 
statistics of London/through the years of great fogs, 
you have noted how the death rate has leaped for- 
ward during the period when the fog was densest. 
A fog of two or three months in London is like a 
great battle—when the fog has lifted you find a great — 
field that is strewn with the wounded and the dying 
and the dead. Not only is a fog destructive of life, 
but it is also destructive of money. It is said that 
London spends twenty-five million dollars a year in 
extra gas-bills which are the direct result of fogs. 

It is needless to dwell upon the colossal losses oc- 
casioned by fog on the sea. Nor is it necessary, at 
this time, to call attention to the long continued and 
heroic efforts which have been put forth to conquer 
the mist. 


MISTS 119 


When Hawker and Grieve achieved the phenomenal 
feat of flying across the Atlantic, the papers were 
careful to inform us about the behaviour of the mist. 
Hawker said that in ten minutes his airship got into 
a fog, and that after they once rose above it they 
hardly saw the ocean again. Grieve said that only for 
a few seconds was it possible for them to see the 
ocean through a hole in the fog. When at last they 
came down they found themselves two hundred miles 
out of their course, all because the mist would not 
allow them to see. That, then, is an interesting fact 
that in the twentieth century when men are attempt- 
ing to do a marvellously heroic thing, this old servant 
of God, the mist, comes out and throwing itself on 
the track, says: “‘ You cannot succeed unless you first 
conquer me.” The whole world has thus been brought 
face to face with the almightiness and the tremendous 
importance of mists. They have threatened to block 
the progress of the world. 

The mist is an enemy to be conquered. It is go- 
ing to be conquered in the air by the aviator soaring 
above it. When the great trans-Atlantic routes are 
laid down along which the airships are to travel, we 
shall find that these routes are all established above 
the level of the mist. But when it comes to dealing 
with mists in great cities, the problem is not so easy. 
We have learned how to cart away the snow; in the 
future we must learn how to cart away the mist. 
Just how we are going to do it it is, as yet, im- 
possible to say. Some experts say that we are going 
to do it by the creation of currents of air. The air 
will take the mist on its back, and run off with it. 
Others think that the miracle is going to be wrought» 
by the electrification of the air. The mist, as you 


120 NATURE SERMONS 


know, is due to the presence in the air of an infinite 
number of dust-particles. It is upon these dust-parti- 
cles that the water-vapour condenses. Bits of soot 
and smoke act as nuclei. If, in some way or other, 
you could get rid of the solid particles of the air, 
then you would get rid of the mist. It is claimed 
that it will be possible, some day, for us to generate 
mighty electrical currents causing a precipitation of 
the dust in the air. This suggestion opens the way 
for a vast deal of dreaming. It may be, that in the 
future, we are going to have engineers of the air. 

For the last hundred years we have been building 
our railroads, dealing with the mountains and the 
rivers and the chasms; in the hundred years that lie 
ahead of us we are going to grapple with the rivers 
and mountains and chasms in the air. Just as our 
locomotives on the trains in the West have mighty 
snow-ploughs attached to the cow-catchers, enabling 
them to make their way through the snow-drifts that 
Winter piles on the track, just so it may be that ships 
of the future are going to be supplied with fog- 
apparatus, so that each ship may be able to tunnel its 
way unharmed through the fog. No matter how the 
obstacles shall be overcome, there is no doubt of the 
ultimate victory. The Hebrew poet made no mistake | 
when he said: “Thou hast made him [man] a little 
lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory 
and honour. ‘Thou madest him to have dominion over 
the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under 
his feet.” 

My sermon was suggested by the present condition 
of the world. We are at present in the midst of a 
fog. It is the densest fog that has ever wrapped this 
earth. ‘There is a darkness that can be felt, and all 


MISTS — 121 


the lights are impotent to pierce it. It is a remark- 
able fact that there is not upon the earth to-day a 
piece of apparatus that will enable us to penetrate the 
gloom. We have many different kinds of lights, but 
no light has as yet been invented that will enable us 
to see more than a few feet ahead of us. We talk 
about our great lights in the Church, in the univer- 
sity, in business, but none of these great lights are able 
to tell us what is going to happen five years from 
now, or two years, or one year, or six months, or 
even three months from now. ‘That is certainly an 
amazing thing that there is not a man upon the earth 
who is able to see one month ahead of us. The lights 
have all failed us, and this is the day for bell-buoys 
and fog-horns sounding warnings. We hear voices 
saying: “ Here is a reef,’ and “ There is a reef,’ .“’ Do 
not come here,” “ Do not go there.”’ But as for the 
reefs that lie ahead of us, these are hidden in a mist 
that is impenetrable. 

What then is our consolation? Here is one: fogs 
are shallow. All fogs are shallow. The foggiest of 
the London fogs are very broad and long, and nearly 
always shallow. A man going up into the Observatory 
at Greenwich, and looking out across London can see 
the tops of the buildings in the city bathed in sun- 
light. Sometimes the fog is so thick that one cannot 
see across the deck of a ship in the Thames, while at 
the same time the topmasts are wrapped round with 
sunbeams. Let us remember then that the fog, to- 
day, is shallow; it does not extend all the way to the 
stars. Above the fog is the wide-open eye of the 
Eternal. He sees us all. He knows what He is doing. 

In the second place, fogs are transient; they come 
and go. The longest-lived fog extends only for a 


122 NATURE SERMONS 


little while. The mists of the summer morning are 
exceedingly evanescent. JI have seen a mist walking 
with the sun across the meadows, up a hill, but when 
near the top of the hill I have seen the mist vanish 
in the twinkling of an eye. It made me think of 
Enoch. He walked with God, and then was not, be- 
cause God took him. The mist and the sun walked 
together, and then the mist was not because the sun 
took it. The transitoriness of mists has always made 
an impression on the human imagination. A New 
Testament writer compares our human life to the mist. 
“What is your life?’ asks James. ‘‘ You are but a 
vapour that appears for a little time, and then vanishes 
away. James Moffat, one of the greatest living New 
Testament scholars, translates this passage thus: 
“What is your life? You are but a mist.” The fog 
is dense to-day, but it will not be on us always. By 
and by, we shall be out under the sun again. 

The third consolation is that fogs are the servants 
of the Almighty. The Hebrew poet was right when 
he said: “Fire and hail, snow and vapour, stormy 
wind fulfilling his word.” A book could be written 
filled with the story of how God in human history has 
compelled the mists to serve Him. In the tenth chap- 
ter of Exodus, we are told how, at a certain crisis in. 
Egyptian history, a darkness thick enough to be felt 
settled down upon the land, lasting for three long days. 
Scientists tell us that that darkness was due to mist. » 
By means of the mist the King of heaven endeavoured 
to bend the will of the Egyptian monarch. All of the 
American historians in describing the battle of Long 
Island, tell us how after that disastrous American de- 
feat the outlook for the colonists was exceedingly 
dark. There seemed to be no escape for the retiring 


MISTS 123 


fugitives. The British sentinels were placed up and 
down the shore. But God, in His mercy, flung upon 
the East River one of the thickest of His mists, and 
in that mist twelve hundred American soldiers made 
their way across the river under the very noses of the 
sentinels of the British fleet. 

But we need not go back to history to find ways in 
which God makes use of mists. Every Spring and 
every Autumn He uses mists to keep off the frost. 
When water-vapour condenses it gives off vast 
measures of latent heat, and this latent heat poured 
into the air saves the buds and fruits. Why should 
we doubt that God will use this present world-fog for 
the advancement of His glory? If you should ask me 
the cause of the fog that to-day covers the world, I 
should say that it is caused by the meeting of two 
currents of intellectual air: one from the sordid, selfish 
past, and the other from the idealistic Christian future. 
The two currents meet, and there is a vast amount 
of dust in the air thrown there by the vast upheaval 
of the Great War. And now, in this mist, God is 
striving to bend our will to His. Who knows but 
that in this darkness we may escape from many of 
the tyrants that have held us fast? Who knows but 
what this mist is keeping the world warm, hastening 
the budding of a million flowers of Paradise? ‘The 
old experiences recounted in Genesis may be repeated. 
The first mist spoken of turned out to be the medium 
of God’s blessing. Let me read you the sentence as 
it stands: “There went up a mist from the earth, and 
it watered the whole face of the ground.” When the 
whole face of the ground had been watered, then the 
earth was ready for a new manifestation of the power 
of God. There is a mist now going up from the 


124 NATURE SERMONS 


earth, and it will water the whole face of the ground, 
and after this preparation who knows what new and 
beautiful thing the Almighty will dot 


X 
SPRING 


WANT to think with you in this sermon about 

Spring. I have chosen this topic because every- 

body for the last three months has been talking 
about Spring. They have been talking about her in 
the South and also in New England, and also as far 
west as Ohio. ‘The whole nation, so far as I know, 
has made Spring the subject of its daily conversa- 
tion. People have been talking about Spring, not be- 
cause she is beautiful or wonderful, but because she 
is so late. We expected the Spring to arrive at a cer- 
tain date, and when she did not come we were dis- 
appointed. We looked at the clock and saw that 
Spring was due, but when we looked out of the win- 
dow and saw that Spring had not arrived, we were 
more or less provoked. We had the disposition of a 
school-teacher ; we treated Spring as though she were 
our pupil, and we were nettled because the pupil was 
tardy. We do not like Spring when she 1s dilatory. 
Moreover, when Spring comes late, it upsets our plans. 
We had made up our mind about when the furnace- 
fire should go out. Spring did not come and so we 
had to keep the furnace-fire in. The gardener got out 
his implements ready to go to work, waiting for Spring 
to give a signal, and when Spring gave no signal the 
gardener had to go in and sit down by the fire again. 
The farmer got out his plough and wanted to go to 
work. He waited for Spring to blow her whistle, 
but the whistle did not blow, and all the farm oper- 


Preached, May 30, 1920. 
125 


126 NATURE SERMONS 


ations were retarded. Nobody likes Spring to be 
late. 

Moreover, Spring has been so peculiar. She did not 
seem to have arrived at all—she came with snowflakes 
in her hair. We have our ideal as to what Spring 
ought to be, and when she does not measure up to 
our expectations, we feel that we have been mis- 
treated. We carry in our mind the pattern of what 
Spring ought to be, and when she arrives, cut after 
a different pattern, we fall into a faultfinding mood. 
We are very free in our criticisms, and we do not 
hesitate to condemn the seasons. But Spring is here, 
full-orbed and full-toned, and so we say to her, “ All 
hail!” 

I ask you to think about the coming of Spring. We 
have been talking about it, but, possibly, we have not 
thought about it. It is remarkably easy to talk about 
things without thinking about them. A great deal of 
our talk has very little thought in it. It is possible to 
look at a thing without seeing it. We have looked 
at Spring; I wonder how many of us have seen her?’ 
We never see anything unless we put the mind behind 
the eye. When we put the mind behind the eye, the 
mind gives the eye a push toward an object, then we 
see that object. And so I ask you to put your mind 
behind your eye, and give it a strong push in the direc- 
tion of Spring. Let us all make an honest effort to 
see Spring. 

What a mystery it is that we have any Spring at 
all. We are surprised that Spring was late. Whata 
surprise we should have had if Spring had stayed 
away indefinitely! There are many human beings 
who have never seen Spring. ‘There are men and 
women in the Arctic and the Antarctic regions who 


SPRING 127 


have never known what Spring is. They have had 
Winter all the time. They have had nothing but ice 
and snow every day, of every week, of every month, 
of every year. ‘That is all they have known from 
babyhood. ‘That is all they will ever know until they 
close their eyes in death. There are people in the 
Tropics who have never known anything but Sum- 
mer—flowers and birds every day of the year from 
the first day of their life to the last. Think of a 
summer extending through a million years, fragrant, 
beautiful, musical all the time! ‘There are other 
human beings who enjoy two seasons, Winter and 
Summer! 

But we fortunate mortals who live in the temperate 
zone are permitted to make use of four seasons. We 
are millionaires when it comes to seasons. We have 
all the wealth there is. No human beings, anywhere 
upon this planet, have more seasons than you and I 
enjoy. Indeed, it is difficult to know how we could 
use more than we have—four. Our mind is so con- 
structed that it does not easily think of what a fifth 
season would be like. For instance: if the fifth sea- 
son should arrive, what should we call it? What ex- 
citement there would be when all the magazines offered 
five-hundred-dollar prizes for the best name to give to 
the new arrival! The name of a new season would be 
far more interesting and exciting than naming a new 
baby. And after we had named the new season, what 
would we do with it? We have already all the sea- 
sons that it is possible for us to use. If God should 
thrust a fifth season on us it would only be an ele- 
ment of confusion. It would necessitate a recon- 
struction of our dressmaking establishments, and up- 
set the whole world in innumerable ways. But there 


128 NATURE SERMONS 


is no likelihood that God will add to the number of 
the seasons. ‘The number is complete, and that num- 
ber is four. , 

There are just as many seasons as there are Gospels 
in the New Testament. It is hard to see what we 
should do if there were five. We could not possibly 
dispense with one of the four. If a reporter should 
steal two of them away we would protest; if some 
one should take three of them we should cry out in 
pain. We would all feel like paupers if we had but 
a single Gospel. Because we are in possession of all 
four, our joy is complete. Why should we not think 
of the seasons as so many gospels? Why should we 
not say, sometimes, to ourselves—“ the good tidings ac- 
cording to Summer!” “the good news of Christ ac- 
cording to Autumn!” “ the good news of the heavenly 
Father according to Winter?” The four seasons are 
so many a neeliee and all of them convey a message 
from the heart of God. 

_ The Spring is a miracle. When you go to the dic- | 
tionary in search of a definition of a miracle you are | 
‘told that it is an event which cannot be accounted for | 
‘by the known forces of Nature. Well, Spring is an 
event which cannot be accounted for by any of the © 
known forces of Nature. When I was a school-teacher 
years ago, I used to take great delight in telling the 
boys and girls in the High School just how it hap- 
pened that we have four different seasons. I told 
them that it was due to the varying of the inclina- _ 
tion of the earth’s axis of rotation to the plane of the 
ecliptic. I took great satisfaction in giving my pupils 
this information for I felt sure it would explain to 
them quite fully the cause of Spring. Yet, after all, 
what does that learned jargon say to you? Does that 


_ SPRING 129 
Hho oa 


decslainatie glory Ke Spring? The scientists declare 
that Spring is due to the angle at which the rays of 
the sun strike the earth. When the sunbeams strike 
the earth quite obliquely we have Winter; when the 
sunbeams strike the earth quite vertically we have 
Summer; when the sunbeams strike the earth some- 
where between the angle of the sunbeams in Winter 
and the angle of the sunbeams in Summer, then we 
have Autumn or Spring. 

But you cannot account for the Spring by measur- 
ing the angle at which the sunbeams strike the earth. 
The sunbeams fall upon the earth at a certain angle 
and the earth suddenly grows green. Why should it 
grow green? “How do you account for that? You 
say it is because the angle is what it is. Well, let the 
angle be what it was, and let the same sunbeams fall 
upon a tree, and the tree grows white, let them fall 
upon another tree and that tree grows pink, and let 
them fall upon another tree and that tree grows red. 
What a miracle that is! Let the same rays fall, at 
the same angle, upon a bush and the bush grows beau- 
tiful, but has no fragrance. Let the same rays fall 
upon another bush and the bush has beauty and 
perfume also. What a mystery that is! Now let the 
same sunbeams fall upon the back of a bird, and the 
bird sings. What a miracle that is! Will you al- 
low me to suggest a definition of the Spring: It is a 
vast complex of tiny grass-blades, blossoms, fra- 
grances, bird-notes all caught-and held in a mesh of 
sunbeams. Only God Almighty can create beautiful 
things like that. It may be that some one who reads 
these lines has been in the habit of turning up his 
nose at the miracles recorded in the New Testament. 
If you find those miracles incredible then close the new 


130 NATURE SERMONS 


Bible and look at the miracles recorded in the old 
Bible. There is no miracle recorded in the New Testa- 
ment half so amazing, so inexplicable, so wonderful as 
the miracle of Spring! 

Spring is a miracle of beauty. She is associated in 
all our minds with the beautiful. The poets have 
been singing about Spring for a thousand years. In- 
deed there is a peculiar style of poetry which is known 
everywhere as Spring poetry. To be sure, all the sea- 
sons of the year are beautiful, but Spring has a 
beauty which is unique. She has a different beauty 
from that of Autumn, or Summer. There is a del- 
icacy of tint and a subtlety of shadow and a fresh- 
ness of loveliness in Spring which we find in no 
other season of the year. There is a certain sparkle 
and jubilancy and rush of life in Spring which the 
other seasons do not know. ‘Where does all this beauty 
come from? It comes from God, and therefore God | 
must be an artist. God is a lover of the beautiful | | 
and the creator of it. Do you ever think of God as | 
an artist? Do you ever pray to Him as to an artist? 
One of the reasons why we do not love Him more 
is because we have such narrow notions of Him. 

John Fiske in his little volume entitled The Idea 
of God tells us about his idea of the Almighty when 
he was a boy five years old. God, he thought, lived 
in a narrow office in which there was a standing desk. 
On the desk there were a number of ledgers bound 
in coarse leather. God was tall and slender and, He 
wore spectacles. There was a pen over one of His 
ears. He also held a pen in His fingers. By His 
side there stood an attendant angel who also was busy 
writing. ‘The walls of the office were rather low so 
that God and the angel could look over these walls 


SPRING 131 


and take note of what all men and women and boys 
and girls were doing. Everything that was done was 
entered in one of these ledgers, and little John Fiske 
knew that God was writing down things about him 
which would face him at the Judgment Day. I fear 
there are many people well advanced in years who 
have never got very far beyond that conception of 
the Almighty. There are multitudes who retain the 
conception held by Michael Angelo, that God is a 
mighty Judge, seated on a throne hurling thunder- 
bolts at rebellious sinners. 

Of course it is impossible for one to speak with 
gladness to the God of John Fiske’s imagination, or 
to the God of the great Italian painter. Why not think 
of God, now and then, as a poet? Mrs. Browning 
was right when she said: “God Himself is the great 
poet, and the real is His song.” We have no dif- 
ficulty in believing that God teaches the birds to sing; 
why should it be difficult for us to believe that it is 
God who teaches poets to sing? ‘Tennyson says in /” 
Memoriam: 


“T do but sing because I must, 
And pipe but as the linnets sing.” 


. Alexander Pope says: “I lisp’d in numbers, for the 
numbers came.” There would be no poetry on the 
earth if there were no poetry in the heart of the Eter- 
nal, Corot painted his landscapes because God is a 
painter, and Turner painted his sunsets because God, 
from the beginning of the world, had painted sunsets. 
God is the Great Musician, the universe is an organ 
with ten thousand keys, and God brings music from 
every key. God, too, is an architect. What is Spring 
but an enchanted palace on whose walls are hung 


132 NATURE SERMONS 


lovely pictures and through whose corridors there 
flow delicious odours? It is a palace that goes up 
without the sound of a hammer. It is a palace which 
only the Infinite can build. It is the Palace Beauti- 
ful. It is an interesting fact that John, on Patmos, 
when he wished to symbolize humanity perfected, 
transfigured by the indwelling glory of God, made use 
of a girl dressed for her wedding. It is also interest- 
ing that Botticelli, when he wished to symbolize 
Spring, made use of a girl with blossoms round her 
neck and in her hair. The whole world agrees that 
Spring is beautiful. 

Spring is likewise a miracle of power. In none of | 
the battles of the Great War were such tremendous 
forces exhibited as are exhibited in the Spring. The 
earth dies every winter. For months it lies stiff 
and cold. When it is in this condition it is impossible 
to bring it back to life again. We are wonderful be- 
ings and we are capable of making use of tremendous 
forces. Wecan manufacture different kinds of flame, 
but it is not possible for us to kindle fires enough to 
create Spring in December. Every winter the Hud- 
son River valley lies in a great sarcophagus—abso- 
lutely dead. There is not heat enough in all the fur-_ 
naces of the world to bring the Hudson River valley 
back to life until One higher up speaks the word. 
When Lazarus lay within the tomb he made no re- 
sponse to the weeping of his sister Martha, nor did 
he pay attention to Mary’s piteous appeal. It was 
only when an Omnipotent Voice cried: “‘ Come forth!” 
that the dead man rose again. 

In Winter this earth of ours dies, and for a long 
time it lies motionless and silent, and then One who 
is invisible says: “Come forth!” and the dead earth 


SPRING 133 


rises in glory. There are people who are sorely 
troubled by the story of the Resurrection, as recorded 
in the New Testament. I hardly see why any one 
should be troubled by a story such as that. It is in- 
deed wonderful, but it is not a whit more wonderful 
than the rising of.the earth in Spring. Spring is the 
angel of the Resurrection. When Spring blows her 
trumpet the dead earth stands upon its feet and sings. 

I recently attended the funeral service of a dear 
friend of mine. The day was almost ideal. The win- 
dows were open and the air was fragrant. In the 
chapel and out of it there were flowers. I found my- 
self in the midst of a flower-garden, and it was easy 
to say: “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, 
where is thy victory?’ Who could doubt the fact oi 
the Resurrection in the month of May! 

Spring is a revelation of God’s love. It reminds us 
of the breadth of His generosity. Jesus, one day, in 
a discourse to Galilean peasants asked them to note 
how the sunbeams fell upon the evil and the good, 
and how the rain descended upon the just and the 
unjust. These phenomena of the natural world sym- 
bolize the breadth of God’s eternal mercy. Spring is 
constantly reminding us that God is no respecter ,of 
persons and that He has a generous heart. He pours 
out the beauty of Spring without stint upon us, and 
He pours it out upon every one. When you ride 
along the roads in Spring you pass mansions of the 
rich, and you also pass little cottages of humble 
farmers, and you notice that into the front yard of 
the humblest cottage, Spring has found its way. This 
beautiful servant of the Most High visits the rich and 
the poor alike. There is no one so poor or so humble 
‘that he cannot enjoy the fragrance of Spring. 


134 NATURE SERMONS 


Spring also symbolizes God’s unchanging love. The 
pictures which God paints do not fade. Leonardo da 
Vinci’s Last Supper is a wreck, and so, also, is his 
celebrated Mona Lisa. ‘The most exquisite things 
which Leonardo da Vinci painted into that face have 
been scrubbed out by the hands of chemicals. Rem- 
brandt’s Night Watch is a wreck, and so, also, is 
Titian’s famous Assumption. So, also, is Correggio’s 
Holy Night. ‘The masterpieces of the great masters 
all are faded. ‘Titian’s reds are becoming dark, and 
his yellows are becoming white. Even Turner’s skies 
are becoming lemon-yellow and chalky-white. Mun- 
kacsy, who painted only yesterday, has left pictures 
which are already growing rapidly black. God is the 
only Master whose masterpieces are fadeless. .The 
colours of Spring in this year of grace are as fresh 
and beautiful as were the colours in the first Spring 
that ever greeted the eye, and down through all the 
ages we are sure of this—that Spring will be no less 
beautiful than what it has been from the beginning. 
From everlasting to everlasting, God is God. He is 
the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. 

T must not close this sermon without reminding you © 
of Decoration Day, a day on which we think of our 
heroic dead. It is fitting that Memorial Day should 
be a day in Spring, and it is also fortunate that it 
should be a Spring day located close up to the door 
of Summer. Decoration Day has on it the freshness 
and the bloom of Spring. It stands at the threshold 
of Summer amid the blossoms and the bird-notes and 
the fragrances of Spring at her climax. It is easier 
to say of the dead now than at any other season of 
the year: “ They are not here, they are risen! ” 


XI 
ODOURS 


HROUGH this series of sermons I have 
conducted you, chiefly, through the realm of 
the eye. Objects of sight are comparatively 

easy to deal with. We love the things that we see. 
In one instance I made a new departure and carried 
you into the domain of the ear. My subject then was 
“Sounds.” In my last sermon I combined the two, 
taking “ Spring” for my subject, which is a complex 
of sights and sounds. Here, I make a radical depar- 
ture, and ask you to follow me into the kingdom of the 
Nose. My subject is “ Odours.” 

I count this the most difficult of all the subjects with 
which I have, thus far, attempted to deal. There is 
no doubt that the sense of smell is a disparaged sense. 
Everybody would agree in saying that it stands at the 
bottom of the list. ‘The sense of sight stands first. 
People are always saying: “ What an awful thing it is 
to be blind! How I should hate to lose my sight!” 
Next to the eye stands the ear. “Isn't it terrible to 
be deaf?” is a question which is often propounded. 
Next to that, probably, comes the sense of touch; 
although some, no doubt, would put the sense of touch 
at the top. What would life be if our sense of touch 
were destroyed? And then comes the sense of taste, 
and, last of all, at the end of the procession, comes the 
sense of smell. If some one should say: “ It is neces- 
sary for you to give up at least one of your senses, 
which one shall it be?” there is no doubt you would 
swiftly answer—‘“ Let it be the sense of smell.” 
Preached, May 29, 1921. 

135 


136 NATURE SERMONS 


It is difficult to say interesting things about the nose. 
The nose does not lend itself easily to romance. ‘There 
is nothing poetic about it. You can work the eye into 
poetry and also the ear, even the hands and the feet, 
but it is difficult to make anything either romantic or 
poetic out of the nose. Educators have never paid 
much attention to the sense of smell. All of our other 
senses are assiduously cultivated in the schools. 
Within the last twenty-five years many persons have 
emphasized the importance of cultivating the hand. 
It is claimed that the brain cannot be fully developed 
unless the hand is cultivated. It is by doing things 
with our hand that we learn to think straight with 
our mind. We have heard endless talk about the im- 
portance of the cultivation of the eye. The art of 
observation is highly extolled. Boys and girls are 
urged to cultivate the powers of observation, and a 
deal has been said in regard to the importance of 
cultivating the sense of hearing. It is counted tre- 
mendously important that boys and girls should learn 
to discriminate notes and appreciate the highest forms 
of music. It is somewhat remarkable that hardly any- 
thing has been said in regard to the importance of 
cultivating the sense of smell. The eye and the ear 
are highly prized, and the cultivation of them is con- 
stantly insisted on, but the power of discriminating 
odours, or analyzing a mixture of perfumes, that is 
not to be found among the list of educational fads. 
Educational reformers have looked in every other 
direction for new fields to conquer, except in the 
direction of the nose. 

In society hardly anything is said about the sense of 
smell. In Japan they have a game in which a person 
brings into the room perhaps twenty kinds of incense 


ODOURS 137 


on atray. These forms of incense are mingled, two 
and three at a time, and each member of the company 
is asked to guess which kinds of perfume have been 
mingled. ‘The person who guesses right, the largest 
number of times, is the person who wins the game. 
No such game as that is heard of in all America. 
We do not find pleasure in cultivating the power of the 
nose. I have read, somewhere, of a person who at- 
tempted to give a concert of perfumes, but it was 
universally conceded that the concert was not a suc- 
cess. It is impossible for us to do anything with 
- odours in society. Even the scientists have not done 
as much with the sense of smell as they have done 
with the sense of sight and hearing. Some years ago 
when the Encyclopedia Britannica came out, some- 
body counted the number of pages devoted to sound, 
and found twenty-two. The attention given to sight 
covered sixteen pages, whereas all that was said about 
the sense of smell covered only a page and a half. 
Physicists, physiologists and psychologists have done 
a deal of work in this kingdom, but, as yet, they are 
only children playing on the shore, picking up a pebble 
now and then, while the great ocean of truth lies all 
undiscovered before them. 
We have banished the nose from public worship. 
This is quite interesting when one bears in mind that, 
in all the pagan religions of antiquity, the nose was 
given a prominent place. The Egyptians were espe- 
cially fond of fragrance, and all their religious 
ceremony was carried on in an air freighted with 
incense. Moses was instructed in all the science of 
the Egyptians. And that is no doubt the reason why 
incense was given a place in the Jewish Church. In 
Exodus and Leviticus we read again and again of 


138 NATURE SERMONS 


how incense is to be burned. ‘The sense of smell was . 
given its proper place in the worship of Jehovah. In 
the second century an effort was made to introduce 
incense into Christian worship, but there were many 
objectors and the progress was slow, but at last those 
who favoured incense were victorious, and in the third 
century A. D., the use of incense became an estab- 
lished feature of Christian worship. In both the 
Greek and the Roman Churches, down to the present 
hour, the sense of smell is made use of in the ritual. 

In the sixteenth century the Reformers drove out 
incense, with many other things, and for the last 
four hundred years we have had no incense in our 
Protestant churches. It is interesting that for some 
reason or other we are willing to use only the ear. 
We all acknowledge the utility of music, we feel that 
music is an indispensable part of a completed wor- 
ship. But as for the eye we are not interested in 
it. We have gone a short distance in the direction 
of the eye, but the distance is short indeed. In some 
of our churches we have beautiful stained-glass 
windows, but it is not until you come into the Roman 
Catholic Church that you find a feast that is spread 
for the eye. There you will find not only pictured 
windows, but you will find paintings and statues and 
gorgeous robes. And not only is a place given to the 
eye but also to the touch. The Roman Catholic 
makes use of the crucifix and the rosary and the holy 
water, and he makes use of the sense of taste in the 
Sacrament, and in order to increase his joy in wor- 
ship he fills the air of his church with incense. The 
Roman Catholic summons all the five senses to take 
part in the worship of God. This is one of the 
explanations of the wonderful grip which the Roman 


ODOURS 139 


Catholic Church has upon so many millions of human 
beings. She maintains this grip on the mind because 
she makes such free use of the bodily senses. 

People who live in cities are especially prone to 
disparage the sense of smell. In the city the word 
“smell” comes to mean a “ disagreeable smell.””’ We 
do not ordinarily speak of odours in a city unless they 
are disagreeable and we wish to express our dis- 
pleasure. It is in the city that we smell garbage cans 
and gasometers and, now and then, get a stench out 
of the open mouth of a sewer. We feel, sometimes, 
that it would be far better if we had no nose at all. 
Happiness would be increased if we could dispense 
with the sense of smelling. 

And so from many reasons throughout the civilized 
world, the sense of smell has become a neglected sense. 
The inventors have passed it by. They have made 
spectacles for the eyes, microscopes and telescopes, 
but they have not made any instrument to assist the 
nose. ‘They have done their best to help the ear, they 
have created the stethoscope, and I know not how 
many other instruments. During the World War 
they devised an apparatus by means of which it was 
possible to hear the movement of the propeller of a 
U boat at the bottom of the sea. The inventor has 
manufactured artificial ear-drums, and has supplied us 
with ear-trumpets and acousticons, but nothing has 
yet been created to heighten the sense of smell. We 
put infinitesimal particles of matter on a glass slide 
and magnify the size of them for the eye, but there 
is no instrument yet devised which can magnify the 
potency of an odour. 

The neglect of the sense of smell is recorded even 
in our language. When a person cannot see we have 


140 NATURE SERMONS 


an adjective ready made to express it—“ He is blind! * 
we say. When a person cannot hear, we say at once 
—‘‘He is deaf!” But if a person cannot smell there 
is no adjective with which to describe him. We have 
never thought it worth while to coin one. 

The result of all this is, that the sense of smell is 
a decadent sense. Somebody has called it a fallen 
angel. It does not stand so high as it stood thousands 
of years ago. What its future is going to be it would 
be hazardous to conjecture. We know that the savage 
is far superior to the civilized man in the development 
of the sense of smell. Savages can hunt game by 
means of their nose. Peruvian Indians are said to be 
able to distinguish a foe in the dark, and tell from 
what tribe the foe has come from his own particular 
odour. But the savages are inferior to the animals 
when it comes to the sense of smell. What a won- 
derful creature a dog is in the realm of odours! We 
call him an inferior animal, and he must smile at us, 
and think us conceited. While he hes at our feet 
he is taking in bits of information from the surround- 
ing universe of which we have no knowledge. We 
sometimes think he is asleep because his eyes are 
closed, but he is not asleep. If you will notice his nose 
you will discover he is intensely awake. He is receiv- 
ing wireless messages from all directions, and the re- 
ceiving station of the messages is his nose. A dog 
can pick up a scent from the ground and follow it 
for miles through the woods. ‘There are probably a 
thousand odours near the ground, but the dog can pick 
up the scent which he wants. It may be that of a 
fox, or a rabbit, or the boots of his master, and he 
can follow it for miles until at last it brings him out 
to the place where he wants to be. 


ODOURS 141 


But even the animals, wonderful as they are, are 
inferior to the insects in their power of smell. Ants 
are said to be deaf, but their power of smell is 
phenomenally acute. Bees use their eyes, but it is their 
sense of smell which is the guide of their conduct. 
Insects do not care for the colour of the flowers. 
Insects live in a universe of odours. Is it not strange 
that there should be millions of creatures for whom 
the universe is not, as for us, a mass either of colour 
or of sound, but a vast mass of odours? It is said 
that the moth can detect the presence of another moth 
within the radius of a mile. 

In the history of the race it is interesting to note 
how within the last three thousand years the sense of 
smell has deteriorated. Among the peoples of antiq- 
uity the most cultivated were the Greeks. No other 
race rose higher than they. There are scholars, to- 
day, who declare that the Greeks were as much 
superior to us as we are superior to a low grade of 
barbarians. They were the leaders in philosophy and 
science and art, and it was one of their characteristics 
that they cultivated the sense of smell. They were 
lovers of perfume. They kept their clothing in 
scented chests. While they were eating at their ban- 
quets the air was filled with the odour of fragrant 
woods. Often the fountains played with perfumed 
waters. You will remember how in The Iliad the 
gods in Olympus were delighted with the odour that 
came up from the burning oxen, and you will not 
forget how in The Aincid Venus, as she walked, ex- 
haled a delicious fragrance. Even the gods and the 
goddesses of the pagan world were fragrant. 

After the Greeks came the Arabs. ‘They were 
leaders in science and philosophy and art, and they 


142 NATURE SERMONS 


also developed the sense of smell to an astonishing 
degree. It is said that an Arab can detect smoke at 
a distance of forty miles. All through the Middle 
Ages there was a great commerce in spices and gums 
and fragrant woods. In the Renaissance both men 
and women carried receptacles about with them 
which contained perfume. At the end of the 
eighteenth century Napoleon Bonaparte every morning 
poured cologne water over his shoulders and hands. 
There is a vast use of perfume even to-day, but to 
many persons it has become disagreeable. If we have 
it at all it must be exceedingly faint, and moreover 
it oftentimes awakens suspicion, for, not infrequently, 
a beautiful odour is only an embroidered veil thrown 
over the face of a dirty smell. But no matter how 
far this angel may have fallen, it is safe to say that 
it will not fall completely out of existence. 

Let us think about it for a little while, and follow 
out some of the questions which it naturally suggests. 
‘Let us begin with the undeniable fact that the sense 
of smell is a gift of God. God created man in His 
own image, and when He created man He gave him 
the sense of smell. When He made the brain He 
made the olfactory lobes. When He was fashioning 
that organ of thought He set aside a certain section 
of it for the discrimination and enjoyment of odours. 
This is the Lord’s doing and it ought to be wonder- 
ful in our eyes. ‘The same God who made the solar 
system made also the nervous system, and one is fully 
as wonderful as the other. In the nervous system 
there are nerves known as the olfactory nerves, nerves 
whose special business it is to carry to the brain those 
sensations which are produced by odours. When Job 
‘ooked at the heavens and the earth he exclaimed: 


| 








ODOURS 143 


“These are parts of his ways.” And so you and I 
when we look at the structure of the brain and the 
arrangement of the nervous system can say when we 
look at the olfactory lobes and the olfactory nerves— 
these are a part of His ways. 

Why did the Lord God Almighty create the olfac- 
_tory lobes and the olfactory nerves? It was because 
He had decided in the counsels of eternity that the 
universe should be a scented universe. In His wisdom 
He had planned a perfumed cosmos, in His goodness 
He had decreed that all created things should be 
fragrant. When, therefore, you stand face to face 
with odours, you are standing face to face with one 
of the works of the Most High. When God made 
the human temple He decided there should be five 
gates: the eye-gate, the ear-gate, the touch-gate, the 
taste-gate, and the gate of smell; and through the 
last of the gates it was decreed there should be 
carried treasures not to be carried through any other 
gate for the pleasure and delight of the soul. 

The sense of smell is an amazing gift of God. 
What a mysterious gift it is! It is just as wonder- 
ful as the gift of sight. If it does not seem so 
wonderful it is because we have not thought of it 
enough. Everything becomes the more wonderful the 
longer you think of it. We are all the time praising 
the eye. We say it is a delicate organ, and so it is, 
and yet it is not so delicate as the sense of smell. 
The eye is one of the toughest of our organs. It will 
work hour after hour, day after day through the 
years, hardly flinching, seldom fainting. But the 
sense of smell is so delicate that you can exhaust it 
in a few moments. Put a rose to your nostrils and 
the scent of it is exceedingly sweet. Bring the rose 


144 NATURE SERMONS 


near you again, the scent is sweet, but it is fainter. 
Bring it again and the scent is fainter still. Keep on 
bringing it, and very soon the rose has no odour at 
all. What has happened? The sense of smell has 
become exhausted. It is so fatigued that it is no 
longer able to carry impressions to the brain. ‘That, 
you see, is a wonderful protection against odours 
that are disagreeable. When you see a man work- 
ing in a sewer, you wonder how he can endure the 
odour. He endures it because he does not smell it. 
The sense of smell, at the very beginning, grew weary, 
and refused to tell the brain what the odour was. 

We boast much about the wonderful power of the 
eye, the long distance through which it will travel, but 
the nose will travel immeasurably farther. In the 
Eastern Archipelago there are islands known as the 
Isles of Spices. Travellers on shipboard become con- 
scious of the presence of the islands when as yet they 
lie below the curve of the sea. The eye cannot see 
them, but the sense of smell takes hold of them. They 
report themselves to the nose before they stand before 
the eye. 

The sense of smell is one of the most independent 
of all our senses. ‘The eye is dependent absolutely on 
light. Without the sun and the moon and stars it 
cannot do anything. ‘The eye carries us successfully 
through all the hours of the day, but when night falls, 
if the clouds cover the moon and the stars, then we 
stumble and fall. But the nose does not weary. ‘The 
nose goes heroically on; into the night it travels. ‘The 
darkness and the light are both alike to it. ‘The night 
shines round about it as the day. 

The sense of smell is the finest-fingered of all our 
senses. We find it difficult sometimes to pick up a 





ODOURS 145 


needle from the floor, we are so awkward, our fingers 
are so clumsy. But think of what the sense of smell 
can do. It will pick up an atom of musk in the at- 
mosphere—a particle of musk so small that scientists 
say it is no more than two one-millionths part of a 
milligram, so small that it is impossible for the eye 
to take hold of it. Only the sense of smell has fingers 
fine enough to pick up a thing like that. When you 
hold a rose before your face the eye can take hold of 
the colour and the form, but those are coarse-grained 
things compared with the odour of the rose. ‘That is 
its essence, that is its spirit, its soul, its ethereal nature, 
and only the sense of smell can lay hold of that. 

The sense of smell is the most intimate of all our 
senses. It is the sense of the imagination. It is the 
sense of memory. It is wonderful how odours will 
call back old associations. They have a magic way 
of striking the electric chain by which we are darkly 
bound. ‘The sense of smell runs down into the very 
centre of the soul. There are odours that cause a 
headache, and there are odours which cause people to 
fall into a faint. There are odours which bring on 
a hemorrhage; occasionally an odour has caused death. 
A man has died, before now, under the blow of an 
odour. 

Whenever we deal with Nature we are impressed 
by the infinite variety of whatever it is we are study- 
ing. The wonderful thing about the stars is there are 
so many of them, and the birds that they are so 
numerous, and the flowers that they are so countless. 
Whenever you go into the workshop of the Infinite you 
are amazed by the abundance of the treasures which 
you find there. I wonder how many odours there 
are? ‘They are as innumerable as the sands of the sea- 


146 NATURE SERMONS 


shore. Some of us, in our ignorance, speak only of 
the odours of flowers. We do not grant even to all 
the flowers the gift of fragrance. We say there are 
odourous flowers and non-odourous flowers. But you 
ought to be careful when you say a thing like that in 
the presence of an insect. A flower is non-odourous 
to you because your nose is so stupid. ‘There are no 
non-odourous flowers. Everything in the realm of 
the flowers is to the insect perfumed. 

But fruits are no less odourous than flowers. It is 
not simply with the taste that we enjoy fruit, it is 
also with the nose. How delicious is the smell of 
an apple or of a peach. Next to the pleasure of eat- 
ing a melon is the pleasure of smelling one. I often 
envy the men who spend their lives working with 
fruit. There is an incense constantly burning on the 
altar; they must feel always that they are in the home 
of the gods. But trees also are odourous, ‘The roots 
have one odour and the bark another, the wood still 
another, the leaves still another, and the seeds another 
still. A tree might be defined as a complex of odours. 
A tree when it is cut down exhales a most wonderful 
perfume, and even when it is dead and sawed up into 
planks, the sawdust under your feet is fragrant. But 
to me there is nothing in the realm of odours more 
delicious than the smell of burning autumn leaves. 

I love to ride through Westchester County in the 
afternoon of autumn days when the gardeners have 
gathered the leaves together and are burning them, 
here and there in piles. ‘There is no sort of incense 
that I know anything about that is diviner than that. 

Of all the shops in which men work there is no 
shop so attractive to me as a carpenter shop, and the 
feature that makes it supremely attractive is the smell 


ODOURS 147 


of the shavings. In the shavings I get the breath of 
the tree. When you walk through the woods if you 
are sensitively organized, there is a wonderful ex- 
hilaration in your soul, and the explanation of it is 
that you are being played upon by so many sights 
and sounds and odours. Nature is throwing you 
bouquets; some bouquets are for the eyes, others are 
for the ears, and still others are for the nose. There 
is an infinite number of delicate odours that you can- 
not distinguish one from the other, but which will 
give you a pleasure which you cannot describe. 
Odours from the flowers and odours from the mosses, 
and odours from the bark of trees and odours from 
the ground. A forest is a great aggregate of per- 
fumes. No wonder that when one walks through the 
woods he feels that he is being cleansed and lifted into 
heavenly places. 

One of the great attractions of a farm is its odours, 
and it is difficult to say which odour is the most 
pleasant, whether it be that of a meadow in the morn- 
ing, or whether it be of the grass that has just been 
mown, or whether it be the breath of acow. When we 
go to the seashore, one of the loveliest of its attrac- 
tions is not the beauty of the water but the smell of 
the salt. Just one whiff of the sea acts as a tonic and 
makes the heart beat. All of the seasons are per- 
fumed and each one has a perfume different from all 
the others. If you were blind you could tell the dif- 
ference between Summer and Spring, and between 
Spring and Autumn, and between Autumn and Win- 
ter. If you had no eyes nor ears you could say as 
the seasons pass by: “ This is Spring, this is Summer, 
this is Autumn, and this is Winter.” E;ven Winter is 
odourous. One of the recent Russian novelists in de- 


148 NATURE SERMONS 


scribing his heroine says: “‘ She came in to her lover’s 
room after a walk through the crisp, wintry air and 
stood at the table, and while she stood there her jacket 
radiated the fresh sweet smell of the cold.” One of 
the delightful features of Winter is the fresh, sweet 
smell of the cold. 

I cannot close my list of delightful odours without 
speaking of one that is especially pleasant to me. It 
is not an odour of Nature, but an odour of an in- 
stitution created by man—the odour of the library. 
I like the smell of books. On my first trip through 
Europe, I was alone and, sometimes, got very home- 
sick. And in every one of the capitals that I visited 
I made a practice of going for a half-hour into a 
library and sitting down, not to read the books but to 
smell them. The odour carried me home, and I left 
the place renewed and comforted. 

Whether an odour is disagreeable or not depends 
upon the person. How true it is that there is no 
arguing about taste! We like the thing that we like, 
and we dislike the thing which we dislike. "To some 
there is no smell more disagreeable than the smell of 
tobacco, to others it is exceedingly sweet. Some will 
tun away from it, and others would like the odour in 
their nostrils all the time. ‘There are people who are 
sickened by the smell of apples, and others who dis- 
like intensely the smell of roses. ‘There are some who 
dislike the smell of a rocky shore at low tide and 
there are others who love it much. To some the 
exhalations of a dunghill are exceedingly disagree- 
able, and to others they are highly pleasant. God 
makes a variety of odours in order that each one may 
find those which give him the highest pleasure. 

What a mystery this world of odours is! How 


ODOURS 149 


many questions one can ask which no one can answer! 
How, for instance, can Nature manufacture such 
subtle and beautiful perfumes as she does? Chemists 
can manufacture artificial perfumes, but they are poor, 
shabby imitations. ‘They never come up to the per- 
fumes which Nature makes. When you go into the 
laboratory of the chemist you are impressed by his 
vast and intricate apparatus. When you open his 
books you are dumbfounded by those long and mys- 
terious formulas. Anybody can take a handful of 
soil and rain-drops and set up in his backyard 
a laboratory, and can have the sweetest of the per- 
fumes which man knows. In the same little garden- 
plot will grow violets and pansies and verbenas and 
flox and mignonettes and primroses and hyacinths and 
roses, each one with its own distinct and peculiar 
fragrance, every fragrance perfect and unapproach- 
able by anything created by man. How does the 
Supreme Chemist work His miracle? We ask the 
question and then stand dumb. 

If you ask why this world of odour, and why this 
sense of smell? my answer is that odours must have 
been created for enhancing the pleasure of man. We 
do not have a nose for the purpose of finding’ food. 
We can find food without it; nor do we have a nose 
for the purpose of protecting ourselves against our 
foes, for in civilized society the nose is no protection 
against enemies. ‘The sense of smell has been granted 
us for the purpose of increasing the scope and the 
volume of our joy. God wants us to be happy, and 
so He spreads the table for the eye and also for the 
ear, and also for the nose. He spreads the table before 
us. Our cup runneth over. He has given us all 
things richly to enjoy. When Jesus said: “ I am come 


150 NATURE SERMONS 


that ye might have life, and have it more abundantly,” 
He was voicing the deepest wish in the heart of God. 
It is God’s desire for every one of us that we may 
have His joy, and that our joy may be full. Ralph 
Waldo Emerson in his little poem Each and All says 
that at one time in his life owing to the evanescent 
nature of beauty he came to the conclusion that 
beauty was something to be cast aside in order that 
the soul might devote itself exclusively to the con- 
templation of truth: 


“Then I said, ‘I covet Truth; 
Beauty is unripe childhood’s cheat,— 
I leave vt behind with the games of youth.” 


But the universe at once began to enter its protest: 


“As I spoke, beneath my feet 
The ground-pine curled its pretty wreath. 
Running over the club-moss burrs.” 


Beauty bubbled up under the poet’s feet: 


“T inhaled the violet’s breath; 
Around me stood the oaks and firs; 
Pine-cones and acorns lay on the ground.” 


That was beauty of a different sort! 


“ Over me soared the eternal sky, 
Full of light and of Deity;” 


That was beauty different still. 


“Again I saw, again I heard, 
The rolling river, the morning bird ;—” 


That was beauty of still another variety: And then 


“ Beauty through my senses stole, 
I yielded myself to the perfect whole.” 


XII 
THE LANDSCAPE 


m® Y subject in this sermon is “The Land- 
scape.” Let me begin with a definition. 

am Of course, we all know what a landscape 
is when we see one. Possibly some of us have never 
made an effort to write a definition of one. What 
would you think of this as a definition? “A land- 
scape is a piece of the earth’s surface which the eye 
can carry,’ or, “A landscape is as much of the earth’s 
surface as one can see at one time.’’ In other words 
—“ A landscape is an eyeful of the earth’s surface.” 
“An eyeful.” Let us meditate on that. We some- 
times speak of a handful, and we know just what that 
is. Our hand is a good-sized organ, and we can ex- 
tend the dimensions of it by stretching the fingers; 
but no matter how big we make our hand, it does not 
hold much. If any one should ask you to thrust your 
hand down into a bag of twenty-dollar gold pieces, 
telling you that you could keep as many of the gold 
pieces for yourself as you could pull out with one 
hand, you would be quite doleful to discover how few 
of them you could hold. A handful is only a small 
bit, and so also is a mouthful. Every boy has often 





_ been rueful because his mouth would hold so little. 


But when we come to an eyeful, we pass into a dif- 
ferent realm. There is no comparison between it and a 
handful or an eyeful and a mouthful. Your eye cavity 
is very shallow, not nearly so deep as the mouth, and 
the retina is hardly larger than the nail of one’s thumb, 
and yet see how much the eye can contain. It can 


Preached, May 27, 1923. 
I51 


/ 
/ 
/ 
/ 


152 NATURE SERMONS’ 


take in all these fields, that yonder range of hills ind 
the mountain that towers beyond them. Fields, hills 
and mountain—all can be packed in the eye, and still 
there is room! Here on the right is a river, and over 
on the left is a lake, and there is a waterfall on the 
side of the hill flashing amidst the green. And all 
these forms of water can be packed in the eye, and 
still there is room! Here is an orchard, and yonder 
is an oak-grove, and yonder on the side of the 
mountain is a forest of spruce. All of these trees 
can be packed in the eye. Here in one field there are 
probably twenty cows, and yonder on the hill is a 
flock of sheep, and over the grove a flock of crows is 
flying *round and ’round. These can be driven into 
the eye, for the eye is a sort of Noah’s ark, and can 
hold all sorts of birds and beasts and creeping things. 
There is a farmhouse, and there is a barn, and over 
yonder on the bank of the river is a sawmill. The 
landscape is not only the land but everything that man 
has put on the land. Here in the field are a number 
of men working. One of them is swinging a scythe. 
Over here I see a man jogging along in a cart, and 
over in yonder meadow I see a little girl, with a red 
hat, playing with her dog. All these are held in the 
eye, and still there is room! Yonder in the distance, 
I see the gleam of the ocean. ‘The ocean is immense, 
but even it can go into the eye. And over all is the 
sky. ‘The sky is also a part of the landscape. Every 
landscape painter knows that. You cannot have a 
landscape without the sky. The sky is the element 
which envelops all. Here, then, is what we mean by 
a landscape. It is as much of the earth’s surface, and 
the sky over it, as you can gather up at one time in 
your eye. 


THE LANDSCAPE 153 


Now, the first proposition I wish to lay down is 
this—that all landscapes are beautiful. Some of you 
may be inclined to deny that. You think at once of 
landscapes which are far from beautiful. You prob- 
ably can think of landscapes that are positively ugly 
—bare and monotonous landscapes, from which all 
loveliness has been banished, landscapes that depress 
you, and from which you wish to make an escape. 
But in spite of your protest, I must insist upon my 
proposition, that all landscapes are beautiful. They 
may not all be beautiful to you, but they are beautiful 
to someone. Every landscape is beautiful to one who 
has eyes to discern its beauty. We are men of dif- 
ferent tastes. We like different kinds of music and 
different kinds of poetry and different kinds of paint- 
ings. It is not surprising that we should like different 
kinds of landscapes. Some of us care nothing for a 
landscape unless it is rugged and wild. We want 
jagged rocks and mountain-peaks and deep, purple 
valleys and primeval forests. But others do not like 
that kind of landscape at all. They want a domesti- 
cated landscape, a humanized landscape, a landscape 
in which the hand of man is evident. They want 
beautiful lawns and flower-gardens and trees that are 
set in rows and carefully trimmed. ‘They want the 
porch and the summer pavilion. No landscape can 
satisfy their heart which does not bear upon its face 
the stamp of the hand of man. 

some of us count no landscape beautiful that does 
not contain some form of water. ‘There must be a 
river or a lake or a waterfall, or, at least, a little 
pond. The heart remains unsatisfied unless the eyes 
fall on water. Some of us are never awake to scenery 
until we reach the seacoast. The inland water does 


154 NATURE SERMONS 


not satisfy us. Show us the seacoast with its ro¢ks 
and its sand and the surf of the incoming tide, and 
then the heart sings. Some of us see no beauty at 
all in old salt-marshes near the sea, or in stretches of 
country that are desert and flat, but that is because 
we are blind. If we have turned our back upon a 
landscape as containing in it nothing worth seeing, an 
artist comes along and exclaims: “ Ah! this is what 
I have been looking for!” He promptly sets up his 
easel and goes to work. When you pass through an 
art gallery, you turn your back on this painting and 
that and the other, saying: “I do not care for that. 
I see nothing in that.” But the artist sees something 
in it. ‘There is a beauty there which causes his soul 
to glow! He that hath eyes to see—sees! 

The landscape is continually changing. God is a 
great artist, and He is always showing His work under 
different lights. He throws a thin cloud over the face 
of the sun, and then says: “‘ Now look at the land- 
scape and tell Me how you like it.” A little later He 
throws over the face of the sun a thick cloud and 
asks: ‘‘ How do you like that?’ The landscape never 
remains the same, two consecutive hours. It is a vast 
colour scheme, and the colours are constantly changing. 

Here, in the city, our journalists get out afternoon 
editions. There is a three o’clock edition, a four 
o'clock, a five o’clock and a six o’clock edition. 
Every edition tells us of some new robbery, some new 
murder, some new accident. What a pleasure to read 
the afternoon editions of God! He gets out a new 
edition of the landscape every hour, and He prints 
them on the clouds. He loves to print hills and dis- 
tant trees upon the clouds. The three o’clock edition, 
it may be, He prints on silver, and the four o’clock 


THE LANDSCAPE 16s 


edition, He prints on lavender, the five o’clock edition 
He prints on vermilion, the six o’clock edition He 
prints on violet or on gold. Not only does He give 
us those daily editions of the landscape, but He gives 
us a mew sort of landscape in each of the four seasons. 
The Spring landscape is not at all the landscape of the 
Summer, and in the Autumn you have a different land- 
scape still, and the Winter landscape is different far 
from all the others. 

To each country God gives its own particular land- 
scape. Great Britain is a little country, but how 
varied are its landscapes! The landscape of England 
is one thing, the landscape of Wales is another thing, 
the landscape of Scotland is different still, while the 
landscape of Ireland differs from all the others. This 
does not mean that you have only one kind of land- 
scape in each of these four little countries, for you 
have a hundred kinds in each country. The land- 
scape of the south of England is not like the landscape 
of the north, and the landscape of Essex is far dif- 
ferent from the landscape of Devonshire. What a 
contrast between the landscape of Lincolnshire and the 
landscape of the Lake country! All the landscapes of 
all countries are beautiful. When you pass to the 
Continent, you have a series of contrasts. The land- 
scape of Holland and the landscape of Switzerland, 
how far the two are apart! Some people say there is 
no scenery in Holland, but they do not know what 
they say. There is as much scenery in Holland as 
there is in Switzerland, but it is of a different kind. 
Who that has ever looked out upon those far-extended 
fields, with their cattle and their canals, could ever 
forget Holland? No wonder the artists all love to. 
paint her. But when you pass into Switzerland, there 


156 NATURE SERMONS 


is beauty of another type. ‘The scenery of Norway is 
far different from the scenery of Belgium, and the 
scenery of Spain is not at all like the scenery of Italy. 
The scenery of Russia is different from the scenery 
of Turkey, and the landscape of Palestine is far re- 
moved from the landscape of Egypt. ‘To every coun- 
try God gives landscapes in abundance, and all His 
landscapes are beautiful. 

This has been a great comfort to me as I have 
travelled from country to country. It has brought me 
relief of heart in Mohammedan countries, where every- 
thing human is more or less depressing. Moham- 
medan government is nearly always a blunder and a 
farce, but in all Mohammedan countries, God has 
spread out exquisite landscapes, and it has solaced me 
to know that Mohammedans, if they are deprived of 
the blessings of good government, are still permitted 
to feed their souls on the beauty of the masterpieces 
of God. 

But one need not travel in Europe to see land- 
scapes. We have an abundance of them here at home. 
No country is richer in scenery than our own. It 1s 
worth while for an American to travel from New 
York City to San Francisco simply to gaze on the 
landscape. ‘There is a film created by the Almighty 
three thousand miles long. No more wonderful film 
has even the Infinite ever created. It is not a land- 
scape, but a series of landscapes, one landscape fol- 
lowing another in swift succession. Now you are on 
the plain. Now you are in the mountains. Now you 
are in a valley. Now you are on the prairie. Now 
you are in the desert. Now you are in great forests. 
But wherever you are, you are in the midst of beauty. 
The only blot on the landscape is the city and town. 


——— 


THE LANDSCAPE 157 


Our locomotives have a fashion of running into the 
backyards of towns, where the traveller sees piles of 
tin cans and rubbish-heaps and discarded kettles and 
pots—where he sees multitudinous clothes-lines, from 
which underclothes of all shapes and sizes are flutter- 
ing in the wind. MHere indeed is ugliness, but it is 
the ugliness created by man. After you have spent 
hours with the landscapes, and come to a stop in the 
city, there blows in upon you a soot-storm—every 
flake of soot in the shape of a newspaper containing 
the story of some new divorce suit or some recent 
defalcation. But no matter what we think or see of 
the cities, there is only one fair judgment of the 
country—the landscape is beautiful. And the Ameri- 
can who travels from New York Harbour to the 
Golden Gate is in a good mood at the end of his 
journey to sing: 


“My country! ’tis of thee, 
Sweet land of liberty, 
Of thee I sing.” 


If he has never been able to sing it before, he will 
sing it now, with a glow of the heart: 


“T love thy rocks and rills, 
Thy woods and templed hills, 
My heart with rapture thrills 

Like that above.” 


It is a consolation to know that the landscape be- 
longs to us all. The Declaration of Independence says 
that “‘ All men are created equal.” There are many 
times when this does not seem to be true. But when 
it comes to the landscape, we feel that all men are 
indeed equal. One of the brightest things Ralph 


158 NATURE SERMONS 


Waldo Emerson ever said is the remark he made 
in his essay Nature published nearly ninety years 
ago. He is speaking of the landscape and says: “It 
is made up of twenty or thirty farms. Mr. ‘A’ owns 
this one, Mr. ‘B’ that one, Mr. ‘C’ the other one; 
but no one of them owns the landscape.” The land- 
scape belongs to every one who can enjoy it, and the 
men who own the land have to pay taxes on it. Every- 
thing now is taxed but the landscape. ‘That is yours, 
and you pay no tax on it. All sorts of property have 
to be kept up, but no one has to worry about keep- 
ing up the landscape. If you own land, you may have 
a lawsuit, because some other man may push his 
boundary line over on yours, but there are no law- 
suits over the landscape. The landscape is a free gift 
of God, which He offers to us all. 

It is an interesting fact that each one of us has a 
landscape of his own. The landscape of each one of 
us differs from the landscape of everybody else. I 
do not know what your landscape is like. Nor do 
you know what mine is like. I do not know 
how many colours you see, nor do you know 
how many I see. I do not know how piercing 
your eyesight is. It may be you see more tints than 
I do—more shades and grades of colour. It may be 
I see more than you. How many of the details of 
the landscape make an impression on you, I do not 
know. Some men see only masses. ‘They have not 
an eye for detail. Whether I see more detail than | 
you, we shall never know. ‘To each one of us is a 
landscape given, particularly our own. I love to won- 
der what the landscape must have been to men who 
have had keener eyes than mine. I wish I could have 
seen the landscape that Ruskin saw. The Alps swept 


THE LANDSCAPE 159 


Ruskin off his feet. He fell on his knees and prayed. 
I am mightily impressed by the Alps, but they have 
never swept me off my feet. I wish | could have 
seen the landscape that Wordsworth saw. It is im- 
possible, for I do not have Wordsworth’s eyes. Sir 
Walter Scott saw much in Nature, but he did not see 
the colour that was seen by William Black. William 
Cowper saw many beauties in the landscape, but he 
had no such eyes as Alexander Humboldt. There are 
some men so sensitive and impressionable that they 
have feared to give themselves up to Nature, feeling 
that they would be swept completely away. Lacor- 
daire, the great preacher of Notre Dame in the early 
part of the nineteenth century, wrote one day: “I have 
said ‘ good-bye’ to the oceans and the rivers and the 
mountains.” He said it in a tone of exultation. He 

had found himself, I presume, more and more under 
the control of natural beauty, and he wanted to keep 
his soul free for the enjoyment of spiritual loveli- 
ness. He deliberately turned his back on Nature, in 
order to stand face to face with his moral ideal. 
William Blake, the English artist and poet, always de- 
nounced Wordsworth as an idolater. He accused 
him of worshipping Nature. Blake looked upon 
Nature as “an illusion of Satan.” He determined to 
keep himself free from the fascination of natural 
beauty, in order that he might give himself unre- 
servedly to the adoration of the beautiful in the spirit 
world. 

One always sees the landscape through himself. 
There is no other way to see it. That is the reason 
the landscape sometimes seems to be sad, and at other 
times it seems to be glad. It depends upon the mood 
of the soul. There are times when the landscape 


160 NATURE SERMONS 


laughs, and there are times when it cries, and whether 
it laughs or cries depends upon our own heart. There 
aré landscapes inexpressibly dear to us, because we 
see them through the memories of childhood. Who 
could ever forget the landscape upon which his boyish 
eyes feasted. When he goes back, no matter how 
many years have elapsed, he finds in the old landscape 
a beauty which he can find nowhere else in all the 
world. He finds himself walking in music, and the 
music is caused by the vibration of memories’ chords. 
They are being played upon by the beauties of the 
earth and sky. There are spots on the earth’s sur- 
face for ever sacred, and their loveliness has in it 
something supernatural, because of the mighty events 
which took place there. 

I think, just now, of three great battlefields. The 
battlefield of Waterloo is beautiful beyond descrip- 
tion; and who can look at it without thinking of the 
men who fought and died there? The battlefield of 
Gettysburg, how it smiles! But I never see it smile 
that I do not see women weeping because their sons 
are dead. Last summer I stood upon the battlefield 
of Verdun. Beauty stretches out in all directions. 
Over all sweeps the eternal sky, full of light and of 
Deity. At my feet the poppies blossomed. But as I 
looked, I thought of the 400,000 French boys who 
gave up their life upon that field, and the whole land- 
scape became dabbled in blood. We must always look 
upon the landscape through ourself—through what we 
know, through what we have suffered, through what 
we are. 

We have artists known as sculptors. They chisel 
marble into forms of beauty. God Himself is the 
Great Sculptor. He fashions the landscape by means 


THE LANDSCAPE 16r 


of thousands of workmen of His own selection. He 
has chiselled the mountains and the hills, the ridges 
and the valleys, after a plan of His own. What is 
the landscape but a piece of sculpture—the handiwork 
of the Eternal Artist? We have landscape gardeners. 
The only reason that we have them is because God 
Himself is the Great Landscape Gardener. 

The world, if rightly seen, is still the Garden of 
Eden, and in the cool of the day, you can still walk 
with God. We have landscape painters, but we 
would not have them if God Himself were not a 
landscape painter. He painted the picture first, and 
all our landscape painters are only interpreters and 
copyists. Herbert Spencer used to say: “ No matter 
where we are, we are in the presence of the Infinite 
and Eternal Energy, from which all things proceed.” 
Certainly all must feel, in the midst of the landscape, 
that “all of this beauty has come from the Infinite 
Mind and Heart.” A man who has spent a day in 
feasting his soul upon its loveliness is ready to say 
with new confidence and gladness, ‘I believe in God, 
the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth.” 


XIII 
LAKES 


W HAT is a lake? It is not easy to say just 
what it is. We all know what it is, and 
yet we cannot readily define it. That is a 
singular thing—that we can know a thing and yet 
not tell it. We cannot say that a lake is a large 
body of water, because an ocean is that, and a lake 
is not an ocean, nor is an ocean a lake. We cannot 
say that a lake is a small body of water, because a 
puddle is a small body of water, and a puddle is not 
a lake, nor is a lake a puddle. Somebody has said 
that “it is a considerable sized body of water,” but 
that will not do. Lake Erie is a considerable sized 
body of water, but Lake Mohonk is small, and yet 
both Erie and Mohonk are lakes. Lakes are of all 
sizes, some are big, some are so very big that we re- 
fuse to call them lakes at all. The Caspian Lake, for 
instance, is so immense that we call it a “sea.” The 
Mediterranean Lake is so enormous that no one 1s 
willing to call it a lake. For centuries it has been 
known as a “sea.” And yet a lake can be very large 
and still be called a “lake.” Lake Superior is as large 
as all New England, with the exception of Maine, but 
we never call it a “‘ sea,” we call it a “lake.” Lakes, 
then, can be very large, and they also can be small. 
When they reach a certain degree of smallness we call 
them ponds or pools. But how small must a lake be 
to be called a “pool” ? There is a pool in Africa 
known as “ Stanley’s Pool,” which is twenty-five miles 


Preached, May 25, 1924. 
162 





LAKES 163 


long and sixteen miles wide. How proud it must be 
to be the biggest pool in the world! A little lake is 
called a pond. ‘The most famous lake in Massachu- 
setts is called a “ pond’”’—*“ Walden Pond.” Henry 
Thoreau lifted that pond to immortality by loving it. 
And, therefore, if you want to define a lake at all, 
you might say “it is a body of water somewhere be- 
tween a puddle and a sea.” 

There are two traits, however, which enable us to 
tell a lake from any other body of water: A lake is 
standing water. A lake does not flow. In this re- 
spect it differs from a river—a river is always going 
somewhere. It has an engagement to keep with some 
other river further down, or possibly with the ocean. 
The Hudson is never willing to stand still. If you 
compel a river to stop, it ceases to be a river. Say 
“halt!” and it lies down and dies, and is transmuted 
into something else. A river cannot stop and remain 
itself. The Hudson is a river, and therefore it is 
always going on. If you could hear it talking, you 
would hear it saying: “I have an engagement with 
the Atlantic off Sandy Hook, and so I cannot tarry.” 
That is quite different fromalake. Lake Placid never 
goes anywhere—always stays where itis. Lake Placid 
is content. It has no engagement with any river or 
with any ocean. A brook also is never still—it 
hastens on “to join the brimming river,” but a lake 
has no such disposition. Lake Saranac is not dream- 
ing of joining any river. Lake Saranac wants to be 
where it is. It says: “I cannot leave my little sister 
to marry any river. I am going to stay just where 
I am always.” ‘That, then, is one mark of a lake—it 
is standing water. 

You always know where to find it. Another mark 


164 NATURE SERMONS 


of a lake is that it is silent. Water is always vocal 
when it has a chance, except in lakes. ‘The ocean is 
noisy. When a storm slaps it in the face it roars like 
a lion that is angry, but even when the ocean is in a 
gentle mood, it is everlastingly talkative. When you 
leave the city and go down to spend a night on the 
coast you go to bed in your cottage or your hotel, 
and hear the ocean talking. It will talk to you all 
night long. It is worse than an elevated train. The 
train comes and goes, but the ocean is with you every 
minute. Waterfalls thunder. The greatest of them 
thunder so loud you can hear them several miles. 
Even brooks are noisy. ‘The poets say that the brooks 
“babble.” An English poet, who was very fond of 
brooks, did not hesitate to say that they “ chatter.” 
All the poets have been glad to say that brooks “ sing.” 
But a lake never sings, never chatters, never babbles, 
never thunders, never roars. A lake is always silent. 
It believes with Carlyle, that silence is golden. To be 
sure, a lake can be made to say something. Ifa storm 
strikes it hard, and strikes it repeatedly, it can compel 
a lake to speak, but that is not its nature. It will 
speak for only a little while, and then sink down into 
silence again. And so, if you want to converse with 
a lake, you must carry on conversation without words. 
Here, then, we arrive within sight of a definition: 
“A lake is a standing, silent body of water, some- 
where between a puddle and a sea.” 

But why bother about a definition at all? Defini- 
tions are man-made institutions. They have their 
uses, but they are a great nuisance. Nature does not 
believe in them—she has no definitions. What dif- 
ference does it make what a lake is, provided you know 
what itis? Nature cares nothing for names. Names 


LAKES 165 


are all man-made. ‘There are no names in the great 
book of Nature. You remember it is said in Genesis, 
that after God had created all living things, He turned 
them over to man, saying: “You may name them.” 
One might infer that He meant to say: “I have no 
time for such an occupation as that. I do not care 
to name things. You may coin what names you 
please.” And therefore a man can enjoy Nature with- 
out knowing any names at all. I am so glad I do 
not have to know the names of the stars, or the names 
of the trees, or the names of the flowers. They are 
all what they are, and I want nothing to do with 
mere names. Names are a great network of imperti- 
nences and nuisances which man has spread over the 
form of Nature. I advise you to tear the whole net- 
work away, and deal with Nature without names. A 
rose is sweet no matter what you call it, and a lake 
is beautiful no matter what its name. You may call 
it “ pond ”’ or “ pool,” “mere” or “tarn,” “loch” or 
“lake,” it makes no difference. A lake is what it is, 
and that is what we are thinking of in this sermon. 

It is a strange fact that the larger the lake, the less 
impressive it is. A lake to be impressive must be 
small. ‘That is not true of anything else. It is cer- 
tainly not true of buildings—the larger the building 
the more we are impressed by it. A cathedral im- 
presses us largely in proportion to its magnitude. St. 
Patrick’s Cathedral is the most impressive church in 
New York, because it is the largest. Everybody, on 
visiting New York, wants to see St. Patrick’s. When 
the Cathedral of St. John The Divine is completed, 
every one will want to see that. It will be the third 
largest cathedral in the world, and as soon as visitors 
arrive we shall want to take them to see it. St. 


166 NATURE SERMONS 


Peter’s, in Rome, has for centuries held the eyes of 
the world, not because of the material of which it is 
built, but because of its vastness. It is the largest 
temple ever erected by man to the glory of the Son 
of God. 

Even skyscrapers are impressive according to their 
height. We have little skyscrapers, but they make no 
impression. Everybody wants to see the Woolworth 
Building, because that is the highest of all. And if we 
ever get another skyscraper still higher, then every- 
body will want to see that! As with buildings so with 
mountains. We are impressed by Mount Washing- 
ton, because it is the highest of the White Mountains, 
and we are impressed by Mounts Whitney and Shasta, 
because they are the greatest masses of granite on the 
Pacific Coast. “Mont Blanc is the monarch of 
mountains. ‘They crowned him long ago.” Why did 
they crown him? Because he is so big. Men are 
willing to travel thousands of miles to see Monte Rosa 
and the Matterhorn, because they press their icy heads 
against the blue. The greater the mountain the more 
impressive it is, but not so with a lake. We are not 
fond of large lakes. | 

When I announced to you that I was going to talk 
about lakes, you did not think of the Great Lakes. 
You did not expect me to talk about those. They 
hardly seem lakes at all. They are vast bodies of 
water that have been commercialized, they are engaged 
in trade, they are carriers—beasts of burden. They 
carry potatoes and pig-iron, copper-ore and wheat. 
They are associated in our minds with corporations 
and factories and shipping. Men write big books on 
the commerce of the Great Lakes. We are not in- 
terested in great lakes; only small lakes cuddle close 


LAKES 167 


to the heart. When I said I was going to talk about 
lakes, you thought at once of some little body of water 
that is dear to you. A lake to be really enjoyable 
must be so narrow that you can see across it. Unless 
you can see across it, it is not an ideal lake. You 
must be able to see the trees and the farms and the 
cliffs, and the hills on the other side. And you. must 
also be able to see from one end of it to the other, 
or what seems to you to be the other end. For it 
is an interesting fact that a lake seems to know that 
it must look small, and therefore when it is long, it 
hides its length by one of two tricks. It either winds 
or it develops islands. Nature covers up the length 
of a lake in those two ways, by islands and wind- 
ings. For instance, Lake Como is thirty miles long, 
which is altogether too long for an ideal lake, and 
so Nature has cut Como into three sections, and when 
you come to what looks like the end of the lake, it 
suddenly opens out into another lake, and when you 
come to the end of that, it opens out again, giving you 
a delightful surprise. 

Lugano is only twenty miles long, but that is too 
long for an ideal lake, and so Nature employs the same 
trick, converting Lugano into several lakes, making 
each one look short. Maggiore is still longer, but in 
this case Nature scatters the surface of the lake with 
islands, so that no matter where you go, a shore lies 
in your eye. Our own Lake George is too long to 
be beautiful. Thirty-six miles are too many, and 
therefore Nature at one point draws in the shores, 
making it seem that the lake there ends. Moreover, 
Nature has scattered two hundred islands over the sur- 
face of Lake George, so that no one can see just how 
long the lake is. ‘Take away its islands, and Lake 


168 NATURE SERMONS 


George would lose much of its beauty. That is one 
thing which the heart insists on—a lake must be small. 
If a lake persists in being big, then the heart feels it 
has been wronged. Sometimes Nature becomes des- 
perate in its efforts to make a lake of the proper 
length. A long while ago there was a lake in Switzer- 
land which the Divine Artist thought too long to fit 
the scenery, and so He cut the lake in two. On one 
side of Interlaken you have the Lake of Brienz. On 
the other side you have the Lake of Thun. They are 
now two lakes, but there was a time when these two 
were one. 

If you ask for an explanation of this, I presume 
the only explanation is that when we look upon a 
lake, we demand beauty. A lake must be beautiful 
or we are not satished. And there are times when 
we want grandeur and sublimity, but we do not want 
these all the time. There are moods in which we 
hunger for the illimitable—the unbounded—the in- 
finite. We find this in the ice fields of the North, 
in the prairies of the West, in the deserts of Africa, 
and best of all in the great sky overhead. But it is 
an astonishing fact, that the immeasurable does not 
satisfy us. We want something else. Grandeur is 
too exciting. Sublimity leaves us still hungry. We 
want the beautiful. The sky sometimes oppresses. 
The sky full of stars sometimes well-nigh crushes us. 
We want the limited and the bounded, the confined, 
the snug, something that will come close to the heart. 
We find this in a lake. And so when people talk 
about lakes, you will find them often using the word 
“lovely,” or “ pretty,” or “beautiful.” We grade 
lakes by their beauty, as some men grade women. It 
is impossible to get people to agree on what are the 


LAKES 169 


most beautiful lakes. That is a subject often dis- 
cussed by tourists. ‘The question is: Which are the 
most beautiful, the Irish lakes or the Scottish, the 
Scottish lakes or the English, the English lakes or 
the Norwegian, the Norwegian lakes or the Swedish, 
the Swedish lakes or the Swiss, the Swiss lakes or 
the Italian, the Italian lakes or the Canadian? 

There are many modest Americans who claim that 
our own lakes are the most beautiful of all. It isa 
question which can never be settled. In the realm of 
esthetic judgment men must forever differ. Every- 
thing depends upon the eye and the mind which lies 
behind the eye. 

What is the most beautiful lake in the world? ‘That 
is as futile a question as the question—who is the 
most beautiful woman in the world? It is impossible 
to give an answer. To some people, Lake Lucerne is 
the most perfect of all lakes, but to others it is Lake 
Taho in California. To others, it is Lake Chelan in 
Washington. To others, it is Lake Louise in the 
Canadian Rockies. To others, it is Lake St. Mary in 
Glacier Park in Montana. To others, it is Lake 
George. ‘There are multitudes who believe that God 
has never made a lovelier lake than our own! Lake 
George. It is an interesting fact that when Sir 
Walter Scott wanted to charm the soul with a scene 
of ideal loveliness, he pictured a beautiful woman on 
a beautiful island, in a beautiful lake. The Lady of 
the Lake is one of the deathless heroines of mankind. 

Perhaps it is because God loves the beautiful that 
He makes so many lakes. Lincoln used to say that 
God must love common people because He makes so 
many of them. And if that is a fair line of argu- 
ment, there is no doubt that God loves lakes. ‘There 


170 NATURE SERMONS 


are so many that no one can count them. In the 
single State of Minnesota there are at least ten thou- 
sand lakes, and in all America they are numbered by 
hundreds of thousands. There are other hundreds of 
thousands in Europe, and other thousands in Asia. 
They are found everywhere. ‘They are on all the 
continents and on nearly all the islands. God tucks 
them in wherever He has a chance. Sometimes He 
puts a lake below the level of the sea; sometimes He 
puts one on a mountain side; sometimes high up on 
a mountain side; sometimes on a mountain top, above 
the clouds. ‘There are many men who can never see 
the sea, and so God compensates them for their loss 
by giving them a lake to look at. God is the Great 
Artist, and He shows His talent by His method of 
making lakes. He cannot make many oceans. This 
is only a hall bedroom of a planet. You cannot get 
many large pieces of furniture in, but there is room 
for many lakes, and so God makes them in great 
variety. He makes them of all shapes and sizes, and 
in each one He brings together all the possible forms 
of beauty. The shores of a lake, how endlessly 
various they are! Not content with these, God is al- 
ways laying islands on the surface of a lake, and He 
makes them with all the care with which He makes 
a continent. Have you ever studied the shore line of 
an island in a lake, and noted the little capes and 
promontories, the miniature creeks, and bays, and in- 
lets with here and there an isthmus, as though God 
took delight in making a replica of a continent—a 
reduced model of the world? Because God likes them 
we like them too. Our love for them came from Him. 

The world is usually lovely around a lake, and 
seems to take delight in showing forth new varieties 


LAKES 171 


of loveliness. Grass, for instance, is not afraid of a 
lake. It is afraid of the ocean. It will not go near 
the ocean. Grass blades are frightened by the ocean, 
and will lie down and die when they come within sight 
of it. But grass is not afraid of a lake. It will grow 
right up to the water’s edge. The grass blades will 
even play with the ripples. They will play with them 
all day, and keep on playing through the night, and 
never grow weary. Flowers are not afraid of a lake. 
They will grow up to the edge of it, and some kinds 
of flowers will even wade out into the water, and when 
they get there, they are so happy that they are never 
willing to come back. They live and bloom there in 
the water. Even the soil at the bottom of a lake 
seems to be instinct with beauty, for when the mud 
of the lake comes to the surface, it blossoms! 

Trees are all fond of a lake. They will come down 
to the shore and grow there, and sometimes they will 
' lean out over the water. It was in that way that I 
first discovered that trees are vain. I saw them stand- 
ing by the hour looking at themselves! A lake is 
the vanity-case of a tree. But one can see in a lake 
more than trees. One can see the clouds. All of 
the clouds are reproduced in the lake. The loveliness 
of heaven is brought to the earth by the magical power 
of a‘lake. What is more soothing than to look at 
a lake—to gaze on its surface so full of iridescent 
reflections! How interesting to note the playing of 
the breezes and the zephyrs, scampering hither and 
thither playing tag, perhaps, leaping into the air, and 
then falling back upon the lake again, disturbing it 
just a little, mixing up the reflections. Now and then 
a gust comes along—a sort of ruffian of a zephyr—a 
boorish and ill-mannered breeze, who is so rough 


172 NATURE SERMONS 


that it smashes the reflections. But the lake does not 
mind it much. The gust speedily disappears, and the 
lake is its own tranquil self again. 

From the earliest times men have been drawn to 
lakes, not at first by their beauty, but by their offer 
of protection. You will find in the libraries many 
books on Lake Dwellers—those strange people who 
lived ages ago, and who drove piles into lakes, upon 
which they built their houses. We have lake dwellers 
to-day, but of a different sort. They do not live upon 
the lakes, but around the lakes. Every lake in New 
England has a cluster of people around it. ‘They have 
come from all sections of the country to build there 
their summer homes, and through the summer months 
they drink in the strength and refreshment which the 
lakes have to give. They are the lake dwellers of 
the twentieth century. Those little lakes have a genius 
for taking the fever out of the brow, and the fret 
out of the heart. If there is no lake in the landscape, 
we feel that we have been robbed. If a man ts rich 
enough to own a thousand acres, and if on those 
thousand acres there is no lake, then the rich man is 
almost sure to make one. His estate is not complete 
without a lake. Nor is a park an ideal park without 
a lake. You cannot make a park out of trees and 
rocks and flowers alone, you must have a sheet of 
water. What would our Central Park be without its 
lakes? 

Have you ever thought how much a lake is like a 
human being? You might think sometimes of a lake 
as a little baby in a cradle. God has put it in a 
cradle—a cradle made of granite. He chiselled it out 
of the solid rock by means of chisels made of ice. He 
has decorated the crib just as mothers decorate the 


LAKES 173 


cribs of their children. Over the sides of the crib 
He has spread lichens and ferns and mosses. Unlike 
all other babies this baby does not cry, but like other 
babies it must be fed. God feeds it on brooks; just 
as He fed Elijah by means of the ravens, so He feeds 
a lake by means of brooks, and the brooks come down 
out of heaven. So that we might say God feeds a 
lake upon manna, a form of food that comes out of 
the skies. And sometimes He. feeds lakes in other 
ways—by springs at the bottom, as it were upon 
hidden manna. He feeds us in ways which the world 
knows not of, and so He often feeds lakes from 
sources which the world does not see. 

A lake breathes. There are learned books written 
on the respiration of lakes. A lake takes a long breath 
in the Spring, and another deep breath in the Autumn; 
but we must not go into that, for that would make 
my sermon technically scientific. A lake, like a human 
being, decays. All the lakes now upon the earth are 
dying. Many lakes are already dead. The geologists 
take delight in studying their remains. A lake like a 
human being can write. Every lake writes its biog- 
raphy. It writes it in the rocks. Our Great Lakes 
have written a series of wonderful biographies, and 
the geologists are now translating them. When the 
translation is completed, they will make the most 
fascinating books ever published. But the Great 
Lakes are dying. So are all the lakes in New Eng- 
land. Lake Moosehead is decaying. Lake Winne- 
pesaukee will some day vanish. Lake Sunapee is only 
for a little time. Lake George is doomed. All the 
lakes are on their death-bed, and therefore I urge you 
to enjoy them while you can! 

I do not mean to intimate that they will die before 


174 NATURE SERMONS 


you do. Itis with a lake as it is with God. A thou- 
sand years are as one day, and a day as a thousand 
years. But although a lake may live for a long time, 
it is mortal, and its goal is the tomb. It is possible 
to kill lakes. They are killing them at present in 
Wisconsin. ‘They kill them there as they used to kill 
snakes. They want the land for corn and potatoes, 
and therefore they are putting some of their lakes 
out of the way. Itis possible to murder a lake. There 
is only one river on the earth which I hate, and that is 
the River Rhone. I hate it because it is murdering 
the Lake of Geneva. It is slowly taking the life out 
of that beautiful lake. I have often wished that 
somebody would catch that river and chain it in a 
dungeon in the Castle of Chillon! 

Because lakes are so beautiful, they make a pro- 
found impression upon the human spirit. If a man 
cannot be impressed by any other form of Nature, 
he is hard hearted indeed if he does not respond to 
the beauty of a lake. It is an interesting fact that 
the man who, more than any other man who has lived 
within the last hundred years, taught humanity to love 
Nature, was a man who grew up among a few little 
lakes. William Wordsworth has rightfully been 
called “ The High Priest of Nature.” It was he who 
led mankind into a deeper appreciation of the bloom 
and wonder of the natural world. When a boy of 
eight, he was taken to live on the shore of a little 
sheet of water, known as “ Esthwait.’”’ It is only two 
miles long and just a few hundred yards wide. 
Around that lake he played. In that lake, in summer 
time, he swam. Over that lake in! winter time he 
skated. He loved it, and the lake passed into his soul. 
When he became a man he made his home near two 


LAKES ! 175 


other lakes—Grasmere and Rydal. Grasmere is only 
a mile and a quarter long. Rydal is only half a mile 
long. They are so small that you and I would call 
them ponds. Around these two English ponds this 
poet sauntered for fifty years, and by his poetry, in- 
spired by these lakes, he opened for millions of men 
a new fountain of enjoyment. He led mankind into 
a deeper appreciation of the beauties of the natural 
world by way of the lakes. 

The world’s greatest religious teacher, Jesus of 
Nazareth, lived by a lake. He was not born near a 
lake, nor did He spend His childhood near a lake, but 
as soon as He entered upon His public career, He 
changed His home and removed to the shore of a 
lake—the Lake of Galilee. The men whom He chose 
to be His intimate friends were, with the sole excep- 
tion of Judas Iscariot, men who lived within sight of 
that lake. Most of His teaching was uttered near 
that lake. Sometimes He would sit on a hill and 
preach, looking now and then at the lake. At other 
times He would sit on the shore, with the lake rippling 
at His feet while He taught the people. At other 
times He would push out upon the surface of the 
lake and speak to the people from a boat. He loved. 
the lake, and I wonder if something of the beauty of 
the Gospels is not due to the sparkle of that lake. The 
Gospels are amazingly refreshing, and possibly some- 
thing of their power comes from the bewitching loveli- 
ness of the Lake of Galilee. John, the Disciple whom 
Jesus loved, grew up near this lake. He loved it, 
and when he was an old man and looked into heaven 
from the Isle of Patmos, he saw up close to the throne 
of God “a sea of glass mingled with fire.’ I wonder 
if that were not the Lake of Galilee, glorified! 


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